It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that we live in a society where there are powerful corporations. And where some of these corporations have powerful friends to help them get approvals for things like tar sands mining. Albert Koehl brings us some much needed perspective in his article Tar Sands are good, but bike lanes? Not so much.

About 13 years ago, a company called ExxonMobil thought it would be a really good idea to start a tar sands project in Alberta. Five years earlier, in Toronto, a report for the City concluded it would be a really fine idea to put a bike lane along major downtown streets called Bloor and Danforth because so many cyclists used this popular east-west route.

The tar sands mine was finally approved because the government panel decided that 3.7 million tonnes of greenhouse gases wasn't "significant". The Bloor bike lane, however, is looking like it will drag out for many more years. A pessimist may be forgiven for thinking that it might never be approved.

After the 1992 report, City Hall kept saying that cycling was a really good thing and more people ought to do it. More people did cycle and in 2001 the City said it would put in lots of bike lanes, except it didn't (but that's a different joke).

Finally, in October 2007 Toronto's council ordered a study to see if it was feasible to find a bit of room for bikes on Bloor-Danforth. About a year later, the report concluded a bikeway was feasible and would hardly even interfere with car traffic. The head of the city's bicycle committee announced a bikeway would finally happen. But some councillors and other folks were unhappy so in 2009 the City said it would do another study to look at the environmental impacts of the bikeway.

It took a full year to choose a consultant to prepare the E.A. -- maybe because studying the environmental consequences of pedaling two-wheelers is a complex business.

The City was in no rush to have the E.A. started, and certainly not before the fall 2010 municipal elections. (Debating issues during an election can be awkward). The E.A. was scheduled to be finished in 2011. In the meantime some candidates running for mayor said the City already had too many bike lanes, meaning bike lanes on 2 per cent of the city's 5,600 km of roads was excessive. Apparently bikes were causing congestion. (It hadn't occurred to the candidates that bikes need far less room than cars, and with more people on bikes there would be more room for cars.)

The tar sands project is now under way with strong government support. Cyclists in Toronto, on the other hand, are mostly still left to fend for themselves while breathing the fumes of ever-increasing amounts of tar sands fuel.