commuting

From Transportation Alternatives, New York. "For the past 40 years, Transportation Alternatives has been demanding (and winning) new bicycle lanes across the city. Now, it’s easier to bicycle than ever before."

[Update: PWIC accepted the Front Street EA Report with an amendment: "The Public Works and Infrastructure Committee requested the Downtown Design Review Panel to meet with the Acting General Manager, Transportation Services, the Director, Community Planning, Toronto and East York District, and the Chair of the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee to review the report on the Front Street West Reconfiguration - Environmental Assessment Study and provide comments to be forwarded to the March 5, 2012, meeting of City Council."

PWIC basically recognized there were some strong concerns about the lack of cycling infrastructure. Hopefully something improved can be figured out in time for the City Council meeting.]

Union Station is the busiest transportation hub in the country. For some time it's been known that something needed to be improved for the stream of people walking in and out of the station across Front Street. Today there is a meeting of the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee to look at the Front Street Environmental Assessment Report. It looks like a big improvement for pedestrians and as someone who occasionally uses Union, I will appreciate that cars will have more deference to me walking across. I continue to be flummoxed why cyclists' safety is being sacrificed to get there while motor vehicles will still get plenty of room. I ask the planners to imagine an 8 year old or an 80 year old on a bike navigate this section of Front.

Union Station would constitute a ”mobility hub” under Metrolinx’s mobility hub guidelines, which calls for "Balanced Access to and from Transit Stations":

• Create safe and direct pedestrian and cycling routes to rapid transit stations from major destinations and regional cycling and pedestrian networks.
• Provide secure and plentiful bicycle parking at station entrances with additional cycling amenities at high volume locations.
• Provide clearly marked and protected access for pedestrians and cyclists at station areas to minimize conflicts, particularly at passenger pick-up and drop-offs (PPUDO), bus facilities, and parking access points.

City Hall is back in business after the holiday season, but the gifts keep on coming. Parking on busy streets during rush hour, or blocking a bike lane any time has been increased by $150 fine if passed by city hall.

Public works and infrastructure voted 3-2 Wednesday to hike the fine from the current $60 for parking in a no stopping or standing zone and $40 for parking in a no parking zone.

The two dissenting votes were cast by councillors Shiner and Parker, who worried the hike is a “feel good” motion when the real problem is enforcement.

Tickets are issued by parking enforcement officers who work for Toronto police.

Shiner said their quota system — called “targets” by police — that sees parking officers expected to issue a certain number of tickets per day means they hit lots of cars at expired meters or on side-streets, rather than one car blocking busy traffic and causing a huge headache.

Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, the committee's chair, agreed with the dissenters and said city staff will talk to police about better enforcement.

“We are moving forward in trying to address congestion,” said Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong chair of the public works committee. “This is a positive step forward.”

The increased fine is one part of attacking the problem, he said, and proper enforcement is another.

The fine hike would need to go to council for approval before coming into effect.

The Mayor has jumped onto the traffic congestion crisis bandwagon: "Toronto’s economy loses billions of dollars every year from gridlock and traffic congestion. We need to make the situation better – not worse." (for example, by adding another car lane to Jarvis). Councillor Parker at least seems to understand the issue by recognizing that we "cannot grow enough roads to accommodate every new resident in a private car; alternative means of mobility will be required" but still figures that we have to be "fair" by making "the most of the motor vehicle carrying capacity that our roads can provide". Presumably this means in order to be "fair" to car drivers Parker would have to oppose any proposal that takes away an existing car lane.

Even though facts never get in the way of the mayor having his way, we can at least investigate this further into this congestion thing. Fact one: traffic into and out of the core has been virtually stable. In-bound vehicles (excluding bicycles) has hovered around 100,000 vehicles and in-bound person trips have hovered around 300,000 during the peak travel time of 7am to 10am between 1985 and 2006. Traffic congestion may be getting worse in other parts of Toronto - the number of in-bound and out-bound trips has increased for city's boundary, but we shouldn't confuse the rest of Toronto with Toronto's Central Area.

Number vehicle trips are stable in and out of Toronto's Central Area.

[Update: I've linked below to the casa map, due to popular demand. Thanks Antony]

Some people (particularly those without cellphones) have been asking for a printable map of BixiTO stations. I've cobbled one together - nothing pretty but functional.

Credit goes to Ride the City which is producing a great bike mapping site for a whole slew of cities. And credit to Bixi for publishing their data so other applications can easily be created to show the station locations as well as the activity at those stations. It enables Ride the City to show all the stations and it also allows us to look at cool activity maps like the following shot of Toronto, Saturday, May 7, 2011. Compared to other Bixi locations, Toronto is doing really well, especially given that it's not even a week old:

Portland is tops for cycling in large North American cities, BikePortland.org reports on a new study, Analysis of Bicycling Trends and Policies in Large American Cities: Lessons for New York, by John Pucher of Rutgers University and Ralph Buehler of Virginia Tech. Toronto, while still higher up in terms of percentage of cyclists commuting (especially in the core), it seems to be falling behind in other measures. Pucher and Buehler make comparisons among American cities on a number of different cycling statistics, including cycling levels, safety and policies. They then compared the data from the large American cities to three large Canadian cities, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

Canada overall came out looking good in some areas. Even though cycling rates have been rising faster in the US, the percentage of bike commuters in Canada is still double that of the US.

The number of bike commuters in the USA rose by 64% from 1990 to 2009, and the bike share of commuters rose from 0.4% to 0.6%. Over the shorter period from 1996 to 2006, the number of bike commuters in Canada rose by 42%, and the bike share of commuters rose from 1.1% to 1.3%. From 1988 to 2008, cycling fatalities fell by 66% in Canada and by 21% in the USA; serious injuries fell by 40% in Canada and by 31% in the USA.

It's hard to keep track of all the new bike shops over the last year or two. Can the Toronto market sustain them all? Is it a sign of a booming bike market? Last year saw:

• Sweet Pete's B-side as the original Bloor West shop opened a second in the Annex (517 Bloor West), a more "traditional" North American bike shop.
• Mountain Equipment Co-op started selling their own bike brand, designed, it seems, mostly for the West Coast market.
• Bike House, a tiny Latino bike shop that exists on low rent costs at Augusta and Dundas to fill a niche on the lower end.
• Liberty Street Cyclery, a bike shop accessible for the quickly growing "island" but takes some work to find hidden just south of the Liberty Noodle.
• the ramshackle but very useful Parts Unknown gets closed by the landlord of the Kensington back alley but George rebounds as the Epicyclic just off Queen and Denison.

And this year:

• Bikes On Wheels in Kensington Market just opened a new location on Queen St West (779 Queen W), with their same range of city, fixies, road and cargo.

City of Toronto

The City of Toronto has released their 2010 Bicycle Screenline Report (full report / summary), which is the result of their September 2010 "screenline" bicycle count. The screenline counts all the cyclists entering and leaving the downtown core (bounded by Spadina / Jarvis and Bloor / Queens Quay) in a 12 hour period from 7am to 7pm.

Since this is the first comprehensive count, it will be a baseline from which to measure if the city is meeting its objective of increasing bicycle trips. I was part of previous attempts of counts at various intersection counts throughout the city but the data was never released, presumably because they wanted to set up a more comprehensive collection method.

Some interesting results:

• the western screenline at Spadina has 45% of all bike trips
• 62% were male (higher than I thought but still better than the 70% male typical for North America, where women are more likely put off by unfriendly streets)
• 54% wore a helmet
• very, very few rode on the sidewalk - 5%, and even fewer where a bike lane was present
• only 24% of the roads had bike lanes but they carried 45% of all cyclists (particularly women)
• cyclists greatly prefer arterials: 67% of all the roads (crossing the screenline) are arterial, but carry 94% of bike traffic