Indeed, the Sherbourne bike lanes illustrate what the city felt it could get away with and still claim to support cyclists. These largely notional spaces only make sense according to the convoluted logic of car culture. Here’s what happens when Official Toronto is forced against its will to bring equality to the streets.
But as so often seems the case, Torontonians are years ahead of City Hall on this issue. Already cyclists in their thousands ride the streets to get to work, back and around. Just as many, if not more, are walking. Public transit, of course, can barely keep up with demand.
Still, as Mayor Rob Ford so delicately put it, his heart bleeds when cyclists are hurt or killed, but they’re asking for it. The streets, he made clear, are for cars and trucks.
“It’s no secret,” Ford declared in 2009, “. . . cyclists are a pain in the ass to the motorists.”
Many would agree with Ford, which explains, at least partially, why so many continue to support him despite being widely acknowledged as Toronto’s worst mayor ever.
At the same time, more and more Torontonians are starting to talk about what a pain in the ass drivers are for cyclists — and pedestrians, streetcar passengers and so on.
The Sherbourne bike lanes, with their raised, largely unseparated, surfaces, are designed to double as bus stops and parking spots for delivery vehicles, motorists in a rush and, it goes without saying, police cars. Had the bike lanes been separated by, say, concrete curbs, that wouldn’t be true.
That’s why these new lanes will make bike riding more dangerous; they give cyclists a false sense of security. In truth, they are a half-measure, a reluctant intervention carefully crafted for minimum impact. They are the arterial equivalent of a lie of omission; they address the issue without dealing with it. They’re not much more helpful than painted lines on a road.
How appropriate then that Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, public works chair and pillar of urban enlightenment, will preside over Monday’s ceremonial ribbon-cutting. In 2011, the same councillor loudly questioned the need for the pedestrian scramble at Yonge and Dundas; it slows traffic. More recently, he helped Ford and their masters in Moore Park and Rosedale close the bicycle lanes on Jarvis St., which slowed the drive by an average of two minutes. Needless to say, riding a bike in Minnan-Wong’s ward (Don Valley East) means taking your life in your hands.
The 21st-century city should have a network of bike lanes. The world’s leading cities do. Toronto doesn’t. What’s needed here even more than bike lanes is a change of civic culture. The tired old assumptions made by dinosaurs like Ford and Minnan-Wong are no longer good enough. Time has passed them by.
Time is also passing Toronto by. With every self-deceiving half-measure like Sherbourne, the city falls a little further behind. We’ve lost 30 years on transit; a decade on cycling and pedestrianism.
Countless thousands have moved into the city; but they must stand and wait so as not to slow traffic. Somehow cyclists and pedestrians don’t count as traffic. That might have been an assumption safely made sometime deep in the last century, not today.
Now is the time for cars to make way.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Christopher Hume
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