War with white paint

As the City takes baby steps towards a more sustainable city 'caritics' accuse it of a 'war on cars'; New Yorkers are enjoying a flourishing of people-friendly streetscapes; and Toronto's Urban Repair Squad is still getting a lot of media attention for its guerilla - yet affordable - bike lanes. Pictured is Martin Reis, I Bike T.O. blogger and URS photographer.

The unfortunate fact is that it's not just a few crazy councillors that are declaring a war on cars, but there's still a strong assumption by many small business owners that removing car parking spaces will kill their businesses.

Greektown BIA, Faiza Ansari states:

“Let’s face it, in this economic time, small business is struggling, absolutely struggling,” she said. “And if all of those small businesses were to actually close then that has a huge negative effect on the city in the long run and our city won’t be as vibrant and nobody will want to come whether they’re in cars or on bikes.”

Meanwhile, Briar de Lang, general manager of the Bloor-Yorkville BIA, tried to encourage the City to put bike lanes on Adelaide and Richmond instead of Bloor, as if cyclists could easily use these streets as an alternative to Bloor.

Organizations like the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation still have work to convince small business that bike lanes could actually help their business. They've done the study, it just needs to get out. Let's hope the City's outside consultant for the Bloor-Danforth study also does a proper cost-benefit study.

herb : 15 years 11 months ago
Tags: advocacy, bike lanes

Are motorists shirking their responsibility? Yes.

There’s a feeling “out there” that because motorists pay “user fees” for licences and registration as well gas taxes and insurance, that they somehow have more “rights” to the road than everybody else. And that because motorists pay for those things, somehow motorists are more “responsible” that the rest of society which includes lowly cyclists.

Let’s dispel a myth today. It is my assertion that motorists are, in fact, acting much less responsible than they claim, and further, that they are to blame for a lessened quality of our public spaces.

First off, there are plenty of articles about who pays for the roads, including articles on this very blog. I’ll refer the reader there to read these entries, and I won't bother repeating those arguments.

My copy of the driver’s handbook, copyright 2007, has written in the second paragraph of Chapter 1 that would be motorists “have to pass a test” for “driving privileges.” What this means is that everybody has the same and equal right to share the road, but licensed drivers have the privilege of doing so with an insured and registered motor vehicle. That’s all. Somewhere along the way many seemed to have forgotten this.

Licensing fees and registration fees pay are set to cover the service to provide licensing and registration -- barely. Toronto residents who own a car pay an additional tax on top of our vehicle registration, one which raises about $90 million to offset the almost $300 million operating costs and the approximately $360 million in annual capital costs in Toronto’s budget this year. That car drivers finally have to ante up and pay additional fees for the extra wear-and-tear that their heavy vehicles place on our roads is only fair, but does not grant them and additional privilege or rights.

Let’s talk about motorist’s feeling that they’re responsible citizens. There’s an old adage that “Insurance is expensive, until you have to use it.” All motorists are required to have insurance to driver a motor vehicle. The reality is that motorists crash. Because of the strength and weight of their vehicles, they cause extensive and major damage which is usually expensive to repair and/or replace. Carnage is an apt term. Motorists crash into each other, into buildings, signs, poles, trees, barriers, pedestrians, cyclists, all manner of animals (wild and domestic) and everything else that happens to be on, or near, any surface that can be driven on.

It’s sad enough we tolerate animal road-kill. But now motorists treat human victims the same way. Motorists inflict other people with injuries, and then leave the victims to lick their own wounds by making the victims cover their own costs for recovery. Besides the rise of hit-and-run collisions, even when a motorist does stay to face the pathetically low penalties for their negligence, their insurance does not cover the costs to their victims. This means that humans are being treated in a manner similar to road-kill in order to help keep insurance premiums low. Victims of car crashes are subsiding the bad behaviour driver’s exhibit on our streets, and drivers are further subsidizing the worst drivers and keeping them on the road; all in the name of “cheaper insurance.” The scam, the fraud, is not “of the system” but the fraud is the system itself. The Insurance industry refuses to cover the costs they are being paid to cover, and governments are complicit because the insurance industry knows that a government will fall when they don’t keep insurance rates down.

Pedestrians and cyclists cannot cover themselves with supplemental insurance; insurance companies don’t offer this service. Our province won’t mandate it because it would mean recognising the shortfall that they themselves created in our current "the victim pays" insurance system.

Because motorists systemically treat their fellow humans like road kill illustrates how motorists are abdicating their responsibility. These are not responsible people; motorists are people who shirk their responsibility for cheap insurance. Cheap insurance isn’t cheap; ask any crash victim: Most are still suffering after a sub-standard payout -- if they even got one!

Lastly, our roads are shared, public spaces. Why should we have to put on “body armour” to enjoy public spaces? By body armour, I mean the “safety kippahs” that cyclists wear, or the airbag-padded, steel armour that motorist’s don? We want to go outside, not go to war. We’re simply trying to get to the store, to work, to visit with family and friends, or to have some fun -- why should we have have to have body armour to do this? Something is innately wrong with a society that would mandate body armour be worn to enter its public spaces; something is clearly wrong with our society, with our “culture”.

Am I involved with a “war on the car”? No. I’m in a war against the irresponsible motorists who aren't decent enough to clean up after their own messes and require all of us to wear body armour to enter public space. Enough.

Contact your local MPP and also the Minister of Transportation and ask that we stop giving bad, and irresponsible drivers a cheap ride at the expense of the human road kill they create. And further ask them to give more powers to municipalities to create safer spaces for everybody that does not require the use of body armour.

By the way, Bike Snob NYC is another person who compares a bike helmet to a "safety kippah"
See also: Wikipedia 's Kippah entry

Some links about the current Insurance debate:
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/May2009/28/c8382.html
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/May2009/28/c8658.html
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/635266
http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2009/05/14/9451791-sun.html
http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jAbwvGoyrx_...
http://www.canadianunderwriter.ca/issues/ISArticle.asp?aid=1000325499&PC=
http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2009/05/15/9464751-sun.html

anthony : 15 years 11 months ago
Tags: advocacy, call to action, insurance, politics, province, public space, safety

Utilitarian Cyclists in Toronto

Toronto's centre trumps the suburbs in the numbers of commuter and utilitarian cyclists, but that doesn't mean there aren't still a lot of cyclists all over the city. The difference, however, between centre and suburbs is that cyclists in the suburbs are spread thinly over an area five times as big as the central urban area.

In this map I've divided Toronto into two regions: urban centre and suburban. This division is mostly based on population density with the dense urban centre bounded by Keele to Woodbine and St. Clair, and the less dense suburbs everything outside of that.

Working with two sources I was able to get some reasonable - though rough - numbers on the centre/suburb split of utilitarian cyclists (those who use the bike for work, school, errands, shopping or visiting) and commuter cyclists (those who use bikes as their primary commuter mode). Commuter cyclists are really also utilitarian cyclists so my map assumes the Census commuter cyclists to be a sub-set of the Decima utilitarian cyclists (though this is a bit of cheating since the data was collected quite differently).

The utilitarian cycling numbers are from the 1999 Decima survey by the City of Toronto (I hear they are finally doing another one 10 years later). And the commuter cycling numbers are from the Census 2001 of the Toronto Census Division (bounded by the actual City of Toronto) 1.15 million people (46% of population) commuted to work. Approximately 45,000 people commuted to work by bicycle as their primary mode of transportation.

The centre is heavily weighted for commuter cyclists with 71% (32,000) in the urban centre to the suburbs' 29% (13,000). Urban utilitarian cyclists make up 58% (280,500) of all utilitarian cyclists with 42% (206,465) in the suburbs.

Anyone who cycles in the suburbs, however, will quickly realize that utilitarian cyclists are still spread very thinly. In the suburbs I find that I feel like waving or staring at every cyclist that's actually on the road - we're like comrades. In downtown Toronto other cyclists are background noise. Since the suburbs take up about 5 times the area (288 square km to 55 square km) and are much less dense than the centre (about 6000 persons per square kilometre in the suburbs compared to 17,000 persons per square kilometre in the centre), this means that the suburban utilitarian cyclists are spread out. The centre has about 550 commuter cyclists per square kilometre compared to about 50 commuter cyclists per square kilometre in the suburbs. There are 5100 utilitarian cyclists per square kilometre in central Toronto, and 720 utilitarian cyclists per square kilometre in the suburbs)

We must bracket the commuter cycling numbers. They only measure the people who were asked at home if they commuted to work and used bicycles as their primary mode. It leaves out people who use bikes as a secondary mode, and it doesn't measure people who use bikes for other purposes, including running errands or for business. For that the City's utilitarian cyclist numbers give a more complete picture. The overall trend is the same, however: there are just more utilitarian cyclists per square kilometre in downtown than the burbs.

My last map showed the location of bike union members. According to my quick and dirty calculations it looks like about 15% of all bike union members were outside of the centre. When suburban memberships rise to 30-40% we could safely say that they are no longer under-represented. Despite my earlier claims to the contrary, I think the bike union needs to do more work in the suburbs to be truly representative. They'll have to cover a lot of sparse territory but needed.

herb : 15 years 11 months ago
Tags: commuters, statistics, suburban, urban