City staff pulled a surprise move at the PWIC meeting. In an appended agenda ("New Business") they snuck in 16.1km of bike lanes to be approved on Lawrence Avenue East in Scarborough. Our mole in the city failed to warn us of this development. This was made even more interesting by the fact that this was done using the new approval process.

The old approval process had staff complete the detailed design work before the approval, including any required by-law changes. In the new approval process staff propose to put a bike lane on a street and work out the details after the approval. Staff are also given direction to put in any necessary by-laws changes or amendments after the detailed designs are complete. The reasoning behind this change is that the current approval process is very time consuming of staff time for plans which may not be approved, and that too much bickering occurs over small sections of the proposal (as we saw on Annette) that it becomes difficult for staff to meet the targets set out before them. This change was asked for by the mayor in a meeting with Gary Welsh, the director of Transportation Services.

The big news today from the PWIC was garbage, specifically plastic bags and coffee cups, so these new bike lanes flew in under the radar.

The target this year was to install bicycle lanes on 50 kilometres of roadway, which represents approximately 100 km of bicycle lanes, as measured by lane kilometre. If approved by city council, we will meet that target with 52.8km of approvals this year. The full breakdown of all of the approved lanes can be found at http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2008/pw/bgrd/backgroundfile-17350.pdf on page 3.

We should be very happy to have met the 50km target in approvals this year, but we are deeply disappointed that we did not get the 50km of new paint on the roads that we were promised. Still, this is a milestone, and it provides a better foundation from which to jump from into next year's projects. We have been told to expect one monolithic report early in the new year (by or before April) with all of the bike lanes for the whole year in it. We are crossing our fingers!

The Toronto Cyclists Union has a little blurb about the Lawrence Ave East bike lanes at http://bikeunion.to/news/2008/11/12/lawrence-avenue-east -- and I'd also like to hear more details about this.

Also adopted (approved) today at PWIC: The pricing scheme for the new bicyle station at Union Station, effective Jan 1, 2009. Not sure when it will open, though.