Corp Comm Connects

How more protected bike lanes can make Toronto commuters happier

Some mayoral candidates may try to pit drivers verses cyclists, but most of us could be either, depending what options are available.

Thestar.com
March 24, 2023
Edward Keenan

When the calendar flipped to spring this week, and as the temperature has slowly climbed above zero and towards double digits, I’ve started getting excited about the near future of my commute. Because it’s almost time to put away the snow shovels and tune up my bike.

That last part isn’t a sentence I would have typed even five years ago. I was a recreational cyclist as a child, like most people, and around the time I was in university (the right combination of broke, carefree and reckless) I used a bike to get around on the crowded, bike-lane-free streets of Toronto. But for much of my adulthood I kind of thought you needed to be suicidal to commute downtown by pedal power. For most of my adult life, I didn’t even own a bicycle.

See, I am a case study in how building a protected network of bike lanes that keeps riders from travelling bumper-to-bumper with cars and trucks can actually change how people decide to travel. That may seem like common sense, but too often when we discuss transportation in this city we characterize commuting decisions almost as core pieces of people’s identity: cyclists versus drivers versus subway riders -- if we don’t exactly claim modes of travel as immutable characteristics, we certainly imply they’re considered and permanent lifestyle choices.

And so whenever there’s a discussion of putting in a protected bike lane that will take up part of the road -- something I have always been in favour of, even when I was never a cyclist myself -- there’s a lot of complaining about how few cyclists there may be in a certain area, or on a certain route, or during certain seasons. I get cranky letters: “these few cyclists are taking the road space away from those many car drivers...”

But as the former Vancouver planner Brent Toderian likes to remind people, you cannot justify the decision to build a bridge based on counting how many people are swimming across the river. The infrastructure you build shapes people’s decisions.

When I moved to Washington, D.C. a few years ago to report for the Star on U.S. affairs, I lived a few kilometres’ walk from the closest subway station, and while I often drove around, traffic in D.C. is almost as famously bad as it is in Toronto. But there was a bike trail right near my house that ran through a former railway route all the way down to the National Mall in one direction -- a 40-minute ride alongside the Potomac River from my house to the Capitol or the Canadian embassy where I often went to report -- and up to a local suburban commercial and restaurant district in the other direction. Suddenly cycling in nice weather was not just quicker and easier than the alternatives, it was pleasant. A bit of exercise, nice views of nature, the wind in my face.

I bought a bike. And I used it -- not every day, but some days.

When we moved back to Toronto last fall, I was pleased to see separated bike lanes on Bloor Street West and University Avenue that had been installed and made permanent in the time I was gone. Suddenly my routes to City Hall or the Star office -- formerly trips I had not considered cycling -- were easy on two wheels. Just as fast or faster than taking transit, easier and cheaper than fighting traffic and finding parking in a car. And when I arrive on a bike, I feel energized by the exercise (at this stage, I can use the workouts just to stay in shape, too).

When I’m on my bike, I am not in my car congesting the roads for everyone else. And I am not producing carbon emissions or pollution that poison our collective environment. I’m not a virtuous enough person for those two things to actually be factors in my decision-making process. They are simply benefits to the broader community of my selfish decision to take advantage of the most pleasant commuting option available to me.

I’m not alone in finding it that way: a study in Minneapolis last year found that bike riders were the people who were happiest with their commutes, compared to car drivers or transit riders. It’s not a means of commuting I would choose without the protected bike lanes on my routes, but once they’re there I prefer it.

And I’m not alone in that either, as the city sees in studies after installing this kind of infrastructure: in 2019 when the city reported on the Adelaide and Richmond Street bike lanes, they noted more than 6,000 new bike trips per day on those roads, a 94 per cent increase in cycling traffic from before the lanes’ installation, and the vast majority of those trips were taken by people who had switched from other modes of transportation (like the streetcar or their car). If you build it, they will bike.

Like I said, this shouldn’t be any kind of news. None of us are going to be surprised when the new subway and LRT transit lines under construction attract thousands of new riders when they are built. And, by now the “Fundamental Law of Road Congestion” -- that building more or wider roads brings more cars onto those roads in a phenomenon called induced demand -- is a matter-of-fact principle of transportation planning (even if it’s an often ignored one).

Whatever infrastructure you build for people, they’re gonna use.

We’re likely to hear some discussion of bike lanes in the upcoming mayoral campaign, maybe even as a wedge issue where some candidates try to pit drivers verses cyclists as if they’re in competition for the road. The truth is many or most of us could be either of those things depending on the day, and depending what options are made available to us.