Toronto’s ambitious bike plan, one year later
City has more money to spend on bike projects thanks to federal and provincial funding, but critics say it’s being invested in “easy stuff” instead of infrastructure that will make riders safer.

thestar.com
By BEN SPURR
June 5, 2017

When council adopted a new master cycling plan last June, it was hailed as a big stride forward for a city notoriously hesitant to make bold moves on bike infrastructure.

The ambitious 10-year, $153.5-million plan would add more than 525 kilometres of cycling infrastructure to city streets, more than doubling the existing network.

One year later, how much progress has been made?

The good news for cycling advocates is that thanks to funding announcements from the federal and provincial governments, the city has a lot more money to spend on bike lanes and other infrastructure than it did a year ago.

But many projects originally planned for this year have been deferred, which means cyclists will have to wait longer to use new infrastructure on the streets.

Meanwhile, critics question whether city hall has the political will to invest its newfound resources in the extensive network of physically separated bike lanes they say is needed to make cycling in Toronto safe.

City staff maintain that the 10-year plan is steaming ahead.

“It’s just some reprioritization,” Jacquelyn Hayward Gulati, the city’s acting director of transportation infrastructure management, said in an interview.

“It’s not a reduction in momentum, but it may mean for 2017 that there’s a reduced number of projects to be in the ground.”

Gulati said the city was forced to shuffle its priorities after the federal government agreed last August to commit about$42 million to Toronto cycling projects through the new Public Transit Infrastructure Fund.

It was a major injection of money, but the federal Liberals stipulated that it had to be spent quickly. In order to make use of it, city staff shifted focus from building infrastructure to funding expensive design work for major projects like the extension of the West Toronto Railpath, the East Don Trail and cycle tracks along the future route of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT.

On top of that, some bike projects were deferred to coordinate them with road work scheduled for future years.

Councillor Mike Layton, one of city hall’s most ardent cycling advocates, said the rationale for the deferrals this year appears “reasonable.” But he argued that the 10-year plan’s success will be determined by whether council agrees to pay for it in future years.

“The devil is within the funding, as with all our plans,” said Layton (Ward 19 Trinity-Spadina). “There’s enthusiasm when we release the plan and to go out and have photo ops, but then a reluctance to fund it at the end of the day.”

For the moment, money is not lacking. Because the city was obligated to match the federal grant and council had already earmarked cash to fund the 10-year plan, Toronto will spend $51 million of its own money on cycling plans in 2017 and 2018, according to Gulati. That’s more than triple the $16-million annual amount council initially authorized.

In addition, the Ontario Liberal government announced last week it would invest up to $42.5 million over the next year in municipal cycling infrastructure across the province. Toronto is expected to apply for the Ontario Municipal Cycling Commuter Program, although it’s not yet clear how much it could receive.

Public works chair Councillor Jaye Robinson said all three levels of government investing in the city’s cycling plan would be “a huge asset in accelerating the work over the long haul.”

“The stars have lined up,” said Robinson (Ward 25 Don Valley West). “I think it’s fair to say it’s unprecedented.”

The original 10-year plan called for the design, study or implementation of 60 kilometres of on- and off-street cycling infrastructure in 2017.

Instead, the city is now planning to install roughly 27 kilometres of on-street infrastructure, plus four off-road trails.

Of those on-street projects, roughly 15 kilometres, or just over half, would include bike lanes of some kind. Most of the remainder would be sharrows (arrows painted on the pavement), the kind of project that cycling advocates consider second rate at best.

Only about six kilometres of the bike lane projects would include separated lanes or cycle tracks, which keep cyclists and motorists apart with a physical barrier. Separated lanes are planned this year on Lake Shore Blvd. West, River St. and Woodbine Ave.

Other key projects going ahead in 2017 are painted bike lanes on a 1.8-kilometre stretch Renforth Dr. in Etobicoke, and a combination of painted lanes and sharrows to link existing bike routes on the north and south sides of Kensington Market.

To Jared Kolb, executive director of non-profit advocacy group Cycle Toronto, the fact that physically separated lanes make up such a small portion of the current plans is a concern.

He argued that while painted lanes make sense in some contexts, on fast, busy streets, separated lanes are the only way to protect riders and convince safety-conscious would-be cyclists to get out of their cars and onto two wheels.

The importance of adequate separation between cyclists and traffic was tragically underscored last month when a 5-year-old boy name Xavier Morgan was killed when he rode off a waterfront trail and into traffic on Lake Shore Blvd.

Other North American cities are investing heavily in separated infrastructure. In the past decade New York has built 116.3 kilometres of protected bike lanes and has 49.8 kilometres more underway this year. Montreal has more than 72 kilometres of separated lanes.

Toronto has only about 25 kilometres of separated lanes, according to the transportation department. They include a contentious pilot project on Bloor St. West that council will decide this fall whether to make permanent.

Kolb said that the city is doing “a lot of easy stuff” like off-road trails and painted bike lanes on quieter streets, but its rollout of protected bike lanes is moving at a “glacial pace.”

He criticized the decision of Robinson’s public works committee to defer proposed studies of separated bike lanes on several major streets from the bike plan before it went to council last year. Robinson said that she wanted to defer the studies until late 2018 in part to get the results of the Bloor pilot first.

“We’re not doing what needs to be done ultimately when it comes to our protected bike lane network,” Kolb said.

In an email, Gulati said that more separated lanes are planned as part of the 10-year strategy, but they can’t be built quickly since “they generally require more lead time for planning, design, consultation and implementation.”