Upcoming Webinar: Bike Lanes, On-Street Parking and Business


The following event announcement comes from the Clean Air Partnership, who along with TCAT put together the recent study about bike lanes on Bloor St. in The Annex. Please note that registration is limited to 40 people, so you should register soon if you plan to attend.

EVIDENCE SHOWS BIKE LANES ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS

Upcoming webinar: March 25th, 2009 at 2:30 pm Eastern Standard Time

Is your community considering investing in its public realm through an improved pedestrian environment or increasing transportation options through the installation of on-road bike lanes? Often, such proposals involve removing some on-street parking and are met with opposition from merchants who fear that the reallocation of road space would hurt business.

A recent study in Toronto found that contrary to common public perception, the evidence shows that removing on-street parking to install a bicycle lane or widened sidewalk would likely increase not decrease commercial activity. The study – conducted in July of 2008 – surveyed the opinions and preferences of merchants and patrons on Bloor Street and analyzed parking usage data in the Annex area.

Among the study’s findings:

  • Only 10% of patrons drive to Bloor-Annex neighbourhood;
  • Even during peak periods no more than about 80% of parking spaces are paid for;
  • Patrons arriving by foot and bicycle visit the most often and spend the most money per month;
  • There are more merchants who believe that a bike lane or widened sidewalk would increase business than think would reduce it;
  • The reduction in on-street parking supply from a bike lane or widened sidewalk could be accommodated in the area’s off-street municipal parking lots.

The Clean Air Partnership is pleased to invite you to participate in a webinar profiling the findings of the study, the tools and methodology used and a discussion on how a similar study could be conducted in your community. The findings of this study will also be presented in May at Velo-City 2009 in Brussels – the world’s largest conference devoted to bicycling.

Date: March 25th, 2009
Time: 2:30 pm Eastern Standard Time
Host: The Clean Air Partnership
Presenter: Fred Sztabinski

The study’s lead researcher is an urban planning and policy researcher currently based in Amsterdam. Prior to this, Fred worked as the Project Coordinator and Active Transportation Researcher for the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation and the Clean Air Partnership. Fred has a Masters in Planning from the University of Toronto. Fred's previous work experience, including time spent with the provincial government, the transit industry, and a transportation demand management association, has consistently aimed at raising the profile of more sustainable modes of transportation and promoting travel choice alternatives to the private car.

This webinar is offered to participants free of charge. Participation is limited to the first 40 registrants.

To register for this webinar please click here.

To read the study report please click here.

Support has been provided by a grant from the Toronto Community Foundation. The Clean Air Partnership would also like to thank Transport Canada and the City of Toronto for their generous support.

vic : 16 years 4 months ago
Tags: annex, bike lanes, bloor, Clean Air Partnership, Fred, TCAT, webinar

Petition for Bike Lanes on Bloor to be delivered to City Hall

On Wednesday, March 4th, noon, the Take the Tooker Bloor bike lane folk will meet at Christie Pits (the park at Bloor and Christie) and ride together down to City Hall to present a 5000 signature petition to Councillor Adrian Heaps calling for the Bloor bike lane.

Angela Bischoff states:

In the 3 years since we launched this campaign in Tooker's honor (Mar. 3, 2006), this issue has become the number one priority for cyclists in Toronto, although at the time we launched the campaign people thought we were crazy.

Angela wants to remind you to visit the Tooker Gomberg Memorial Library at the Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina (at Queen), 4th floor, open during office hours.

Tooker Gomberg was an inspirational and passionate activist and Angela's partner. You can read more about him on the Greenspiration site, or be inspired by some of his quotes:

- Have hope, passion and confidence that valuable change can and does happen because individuals take bold initiative.

- You can easily join the millions of people around the world working towards ecological health and sustainability just by doing something.

- Go forth and agitate.

- Our greatest hurtle is not money; it's imagining how things could be different.

- Am I dreaming? Of course I am. But what's the alternative? I would rather dream that things can be better.

- Imagine what impact it would have if millions of people were prepared to risk arrest for their principles.

- Hitchhiking, walking and bicycling should become signs of good citizenship.

- Be creative and persistent. Creativity and decentralization are our strengths.

- Peace, like freedom, takes effort.

- Everybody knows that the greatest threat to our species' survival, next to all out nuclear war, is the massive experiment we are undertaking with the very air we breath, the atmosphere that cushions our blue planet from the frostiness of deep space. Through ignorance, greed and a perverse economic system, we are throwing more and more fuel on a fire that we all know needs to be extinguished.

- If there was a fire across the street, wouldn't you break a window, or break the law, to save a life? Are we facing unprecedented crisis on planet earth or aren't we?

- As the climate changes, so must our consciousness. And our words into actions.

- Each of us can and should ride our bike, compost our car, and weatherstrip around our windows. But we can and must also apply political pressure.

- We must always consider the consequences that our decisions will have on our children.

- In the hallways of power we must tell the truth: the costs of all this auto-mobility are much too high. In human terms. In dollar terms.

- We must find ways to spice up our imaginations, and tap into our yearning for clean air and a livable city. We bury the car today in the hope that we can stop burying our friends and our loved ones. With spark and spirit we can end the car-nage, and rebuild our city so that cars are hardly necessary; where what we need is in our neighbourhood or accessible by healthier means of travel. We can evolve our city into a healthy place for people and nature, not asphalt and poison. We can do it. If we will it.

- After twenty years of working to educate and mobilize for sustainable cities, I'm now convinced that the process of change is mostly a cultural one. New ideas are first ignored, then scorned, and then embraced as obvious. The first step is to get the ideas out into the public arena for consideration.

- It's time for the passion for change to rush over the planet like a tidal wave.

- Let's focus the glass and sizzle the tinder into blazing action.

- We succeeded in putting forward a vision of a sustainable city, and showed that more often than not, doing right by the Earth also helped the city's financial bottom line.

- Elections are a time when people consider possibilities. It IS possible to protect the earth, create meaningful employment, revive our neighbourhoods, and involve citizens in the decisions that affect their lives. And especially during elections people are yearning for an attractive picture of a sustainable, equitable city of the new millenium. Let's get out the paintbrushes!

- It IS possible to protect the earth, create meaningful employment, revive our neighbourhoods, and involve citizens in the decisions that affect their lives.

herb : 16 years 4 months ago
Tags: bike lanes, bloor street bike lane, politics, take the tooker

Bixi, now with ads

Increasingly municipal governments seem to need advertising revenue to get any public infrastructure built. Since the City of Toronto had already sold its public soul to Astral Media, it has been Councillor Adrian Heap's position that no bikesharing system could be set up in the City without Astral's help or approval, despite the fact that a bikesharing system could conceivably be operated with no advertising revenues. Any day now we should be hearing from the City what Astral Media is proposing for Toronto's bikesharing system. (Would City officials take the same position with any extension of our transit system? Unlikely. The only thing that seems to stand in the way is that the TTC is already a public entity, and that a heck of a lot of public space would need to be given up in order to pay for it all.)

This author as well as the Toronto Public Space Committee got pretty interested in Montreal's Bixi program, being implemented by the municipal government's parking authority. It looked like Montreal still thought of the public realm as public. They had also promised us that there would be no advertising revenues needed to operate Bixi, unlike similar operations such as those run by JCDecaux and Clear Channel. It would be run purely on user fees. Bixi has also garnered interest in other cities including Philadelphia, where they recently demoed their bikes. There was a chance that Toronto would take bikesharing seriously and put in a system worthy of this city.

Despite Bixi's assertions that they could operate the system without advertising revenue, they decided to slap some on anyway. According to Astral's document they've got 5 packages of 40 advertising faces for $55,000 gross per package. That comes to $275,000 gross for all advertising revenue for the entire season. That doesn't seem like all that much money coming to Astral, let alone to Bixi. I'm not sure what's the big benefit for Bixi.

At least Bixi is still a public entity and not run by an advertising company unlike in Paris where JCDecaux appears to be extorting the citizens of Paris for more money.

From Astral's website:

BIXI is Montréal's new public self-serve bike-sharing system. With 300 docking stations in six city districts, this innovative program will make nearly 3000 bicycles available to Montrealers for short trips between April and mid-November.

Astral Media Outdoor is proud to partner with BIXI to create this new green and sustainable urban advertising network. BIXI offers advertisers 200 advertising faces in the heart of the city, with more than 75% located in downtown Montréal.

herb : 16 years 4 months ago
Tags: advertising, bikesharing