The Orange team won the ThinkBike with their excellent ideas for improving Sherbourne street and its bike lanes from the lake up to Bloor.

ThinkBike was a two day workshop where visiting Dutch planners participated in the playful planning contest of local planners and citizens (the group will travel on to Chicago next). The interesting results were presented at El Mocambo last Tuesday to a much larger crowd than you'd expect for a planning exercise. It certainly helped that the cycling crowd has diversified; more people are interested in how the streets can be made safer; and the City staff are doing a much better job of reaching out to the general public. We all learned a few things (and not just some "Englutch").

The Blue Team presented an equally impressive proposal on improving the bikeway network in the downtown core and some excellent ideas of what should be included in an updated Bike Plan (which needs some reworking given the political threats to cycling in Toronto).

[img_assist|nid=4107|title=More thought went into Sherbourne street than Rob Ford's team put into running the entire city|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=500|height=709]

[img_assist|nid=4109|title=Proposed design for a Sherbourne intersection|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=500|height=667]

[img_assist|nid=4108|title=The Blue Team presents their findings to the receptive crowd|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=500|height=375]

[img_assist|nid=4110|title=The Blue team's plan for downtown Toronto|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=500|height=375]

[img_assist|nid=4111|title=The Blue team's proposed improved bike plan|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=500|height=375]

[img_assist|nid=4112|title=More on Blue team's proposed bike plan|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=500|height=375]

[img_assist|nid=4113|title=And final installment on proposed improved bike plan|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=500|height=375]

Will we ever see this become reality? It's clear that Toronto has a powerful mix of weaknesses and strengths, as pointed out by the last photos. We've got to deal with a strong pro-car ideology; yet we also have one of the strongest cycling cities in North America. Our infrastructure is falling behind; but at the same time more and more people are fighting to improve it.

Even the Dutch had to struggle against a post-war car boom to achieve a friendlier and healthier city. As Amsterdamize points out in comment about ThinkBike:

As you also know by now, is that this didn’t ‘just happen’ or ‘has always been the case’. It’s man made, purposefully. Just like anywhere else in the world we experienced a post-war car boom, a tidal wave that quickly pushed people on bikes to the side, taking cycling rates way down. In the early 70’s a few visionary people stood up and said ‘no more’. This group successfully advocated for safe infrastructure, policies & legislation, they are now known as de Fietsersbond, aka the Cyclists Union.

What basically happened is that it found common ground with local, regional and national policy makers, and paved the way for institutionalized bicycle policies, integral to urban planning, education and legislation.

Decades of trial-and-error, turning best practices into national templates and sufficient funding resulted in an unprecedented cycling experience (just ask someone you know who’s ever visited). Anyone in the Netherlands can cycle, wherever, whenever, anywhere. The integral approach paid dividends, as all the facts will tell you, benefiting the whole of society. Highest number of trips per capita, most cycled kilometers, highest cycle & lowest casualty rates…in the world.

As two first steps towards that goal, I encourage you to buy a Toronto Cyclists Union membership, and then a BIXI Toronto membership (even if just as a political statement, or to give the membership as a gift to a friend).