Takethetooker

The parked cars on St. George St. below aren’t just parked in the bike lane, (with their correct parking spaces to the right of the bike lane in an indented bay,) they’re so far out they’re constraining the travel lane. And there is no bike lane, and cyclists have to take the lane to have a bit of safety.

Councillor Vaughan’s championing of the recent Bloor Visioning OPA – without seeing bike safety as any issue worth being concerned about – and thus approving both the status quo of risk but increasing!! risks with the indented parking bays while avoiding warnings of increased dangers to cyclists by increasing the constrained cycling conditions we face is irresponsible.

I also feel that the various Resident’s Association’s in the area have some responsibility and thus liability for making the risk both ongoing and in wintertime, making it worse.

Roncesvalles has also ignored these design issues, which have been raised before, with examples on College and Spadina. While this year, year-round cyclists have been very lucky with little snow, and the odds of climate change will mean more of this lightness, we also will still have some snow and judging by years of exposure to this inability to plow out indents, cyclists will be at risk from bad design and civic inability to do basic operations.

Yes, the snow has to go somewhere – but the degree of encroachment shown here is excessive, and presents too much unnecessary risk to cyclists.

What was it like in the Netherlands in the 50s?

And Denmark in the 30s?

Thanks to long-time TTT volunteer Geoffrey for digging up these lovely clips.

From theWashCyle blog, comes news about the Sharrow implementation in Long Beach, CA:

The green strip created a "sharrow" — a 6-foot-wide space in the middle of the right lane of traffic

That there is a good sharrow design.

Date: Monday February 1, 2010
Time: 6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Location: Metro Hall, 55 John St. Room 308-309

The objective of this meeting is to get community input on proposed new downtown bikeways that the Transportation Services Cycling Infrastructure and Programs group is working on for 2010.

Topics will discuss concepts and criteria for new projects, including:
•    2010 bicy cle lanes
•    Rush hour sharrow bicycle markings on streetcar routes
•    New bicycle lane intersection treatments at signalized intersections
•    Locations for bicycle boxes at intersections
•    Updates on the West-End bikeways project

Participants are invited to attend for a brief presentation and question period with City Staff from 6:30 – 7:00 p.m.   From 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. the floor will be open for the public to view maps, talk to staff about projects, and submit comments and suggestions.

Visit the city’s website at www.toronto.ca/cycling

Congratulations to Hamish for winning the Most Tenacious Cycling Advocate Award for 2010. It was a well-deserved honour for Hamish, who rarely misses a chance to get a word in at city hall on behalf of cyclists and forms the core of the Take The Tooker team along with Angela. Thanks for all the hard work, Hamish!

Kyle Rae promised to put on bike lanes on Bloor in his last election campaign, and it was somewhat reinforced by a motion of Council to greatly upgrade the bike safety conditions on Bloor in Yorkville as part of that reconstruction.

But sadly, all we’re getting are sharrows.

While sharrows do have some real potential for improving our city’s biking, they’re so inferior when put beside what’s often done in Europe, and what could have been done here on Bloor in Yorkville.

The true tragedy is that there is room on the new road for bike lanes, just they’re being paved shut – in granite – with wasted space between the planters and the curb of .8M – which bike-friendly design would reclaim for bike lanes, as the road is just one lousy metre too narrow for good bike lanes of 1.5M and two travel lanes of 3M (Total is 15M, the new road is 14M).

Elsewhere in the City, this space between planter/curb is far less eg. Wellesley near Church, and in the Annex, and the entries to the subway at King and University are right at the curb.

So as Kyle Rae announces that he’s not going to run again – details are here http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/738176–rae-takes-aim-at-other-politicians?bn=1 – he shouldn’t be thinking he’s got a great legacy of providing for bikes, as his tenure started in 1991 – a bit before that Marshall Macklin Monaghan report that nodded to wide Bloor from Broadview over to Spadina as the #1 best spot in the old core for east-west bike lanes.

And the follow-up option and compromise of using Wellesley St. for an east-west bike lane is in itself badly compromised in design, and execution, where it became apparent after a year of vexing by Hamish and an FOI that the City has installed an irregular bike lane that has a true danger spot on the eastbound bike lane where it curves east of Jarvis St., and that this lack of safety is caused by the City not knowing what the true dimension of the road actually is (12.5M on paper, 12.0M in reality).

So like Mr. Miller’s legacy, the legacy of Kyle Rae can’t be seen as positive, but instead far more of a set of lost opportunities marred by the horrific death of an admittedly not poster-child cyclist that if the City had acted 18 years ago to provide bike safety with bike lanes parallel to the subway, we wouldn’t have had a pair of tragedies.

While the road-ripping has seemed paused for Christmas, with a spurt of tree-destroying despite the desire for more consumption of the season, it’s a shame that our leaders can’t pause this project to give cyclists and our climate a real nice Christmas present of extra space for bike lanes – some year – with pushing back that curb for the remnant two-thirds of the project. This includes Mr. Rae and Mr. Miller, who need to truly "green" their legacy.

Copenhagen, of Kobenhavn in the language of the locals, has long been a city of cyclists. Now it’s also the site of the big CO₂ negotiations. The two should tie-in together though, n’est pas?

With many thanks to Tino.

Kathy’s become involved in the Ward 29 bike group, and has been documenting some of the travesties of the east end – here’s one…