Does the following Bloor Street plan for the Annex neighbourhood contradict the Sustainability Report Recommendations which were adopted by council?
Final meeting held for first phase of Bloor visioning study
Cyclists attended the meetings with bicycle bells, protesting the lack of bicycle lanes in the plan.
"How do you reconcile your principle of sustainability with the accommodation of cars," said Richard Gilbert, noting how inefficient a mode of transportation cars are.
City staff present explained that the plan doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility of bike lanes. They stressed that lanes need to be part of a network, and creating them piecemeal across the city won't offer tangible solutions either.
It appears the city staff who attended this meeting plan to implement the entire, complete network all at once. On which night will this happen?
Fortunately, unofficial word from city hall has been in favour of "piecemeal" implementation of the bike network, since the previous attempts to implement from the core outwards have failed so miserably. If this is the new strategy (and other readers here probably know much more than me), it would mean that a bike lane on this section of Bloor would be the first of many pieces of a complete network.
Comments
Svend
parking
Sun, 12/30/2007 - 13:42They're on the right track as far as making it more pedestrian friendly.
I think the road needs to remain a 4 lane since it's used for allnight bus service, it's part of the bus route for many other routes and also needs to be available when the subway is down.
It would improve the street even more if they fully eliminated street parking on both sides of this main road, they'd have room to expand the sidewalks a few feet and create bike lanes as well.
This shouldn't be seen as a piecemeal look at bikelanes, they should be aware that the full length of Bloor/Danforth could use the same approach.
hamish (not verified)
The "plans" offered up are
Thu, 01/03/2008 - 22:46The "plans" offered up are half-baked and basically continue current practices of roadkill roulette. They neglect to provide anything to cyclists, even though there is a high volume of bike traffic and also of crash and harm.
There is no other more logical place to squeeze cars a bit and favour bikes than along the length of the subway. Unfortunately we cannot rely on well-paid consultants nor the City to do the basic planning for the greenhouse century that's required. They seem to be content with cutting one of the westbound car traffic lanes, and boosting the wider sidewalks in portions when they don't have car parking a la College or southbound St. George - which are awful for bikes in wintertime.
And we shouldn't be duped into thinking that good principles will translate into good streets - sure pedestrians need better treatment, but the better treatment could start now, with some fixing of the walking conditions.
There's also a basic point: cyclists are sometimes on the sidewalk because the roads aren't safe for cyclists, so making things better for peds means better biking.
There's a REALLY strong need for Ward 20/Annex and Harbord Village area biking residents to involve themselves in this process as the local RAs have weight with the councillor Vaughan, and he's not going to go against their preferences unless there's a certain degree of contact/pressure.
details of the project may be found here
http://www.toronto.ca/planning/bloorcorridor.htm
and the email would be councillor_vaughan@toronto.ca
And as for the destination vs.corridor - the meeting really was helped by a staffer from the City telling the crowd that Council had approved a study of the 18km Bloor/Danforth bikeway concept - and it may just trump this minor study, though it's also quite important.
One important tidbit of info from Ms.Keesmat was that there was a suggestion 10 years ago to have a bike lane on Bloor, but likely on the narrower part west of Spadina, instead of east.
Darren_S
Piecemeal.
Sun, 12/30/2007 - 22:24You have to love City Hall. They can argue which ever side best suits their needs. The whole bike plan is a piecemeal blunder.