Toronto officials not separating Adelaide bike lane despite council vote
Transportation chief says pilot project status means city can experiment with types of “cycle tracks” to see what works.

theStar.com
Aug. 6, 2014
Daniel Dale

Toronto’s council voted 39-0 in June to install a “cycle track” on downtown Adelaide St. W. as part of a pilot project.

The city did not build a cycle track.

A cycle track is a bike lane physically separated from the rest of traffic. The government report on the Adelaide project, from transportation chief Stephen Buckley, suggested the city would use “flexi-posts.”

But there were no posts of any kind when the eastbound Adelaide lane opened with fanfare last week, nor any other physical barrier. Cyclists are kept apart from motorized vehicles only by white lines painted on the road and a metre-wide buffer zone.

Advocacy group Cycle Toronto demanded Wednesday that city transportation officials comply with council’s directive. Buckley rejected the group’s concerns.

Buckley acknowledged that the current lane is probably best defined as a “buffered bike lane,” not the cycle track council voted for. But he noted that council also “voted for a pilot.”

In a pilot project, he said, his department has the flexibility to experiment and see what works. He said he has asked his staff to “play with some things” and closely monitor the results.

“There’s folks out there that — they want what they want. And they have in their mind what they want. And I’ll say I think that the folks should trust the civil servants that are working on this, and let us sort of try new things. Which is the whole point of doing a pilot,” Buckley said.

Jared Kolb, Cycle Toronto’s executive director, said council did not give Buckley the freedom to decide whether or not to erect a physical barrier. Council’s language, he said, is “very clear”: the city is to create a separated lane.

“That has been the intent from council the whole time,” Kolb said. “I see what Steve is getting at there. However, if there was going to be a multi-phase implementation plan, that very much could have been included in the June pilot-project item. It wasn’t. The direction was to build cycle tracks.”

Buckley said flexible posts “create a lot of operational issues”: the posts get ruined during winter, can become “tripping hazards” if they get knocked over, and impede mechanical street-sweeping machines.

Kolb said the absence of a physical barrier has created “a dangerous situation” on a fast-moving street. Buckley said the existence of the new lane has actually made cyclists safer — and that flexible posts don’t offer “real protection” from cars anyway.

He also said he has seen only one or two motorized vehicles encroach on the lane each time he has visited the site. Some cyclists say the problem is more severe.

“Took the Adelaide bike lanes for the first time today,” architect Paul Kulig wrote on Twitter. “On my way to work I ran into: a dump truck, a station wagon, a minivan, three Beck Taxi cabs, a glass delivery truck, a concrete truck, a pump truck, a CAA vehicle and an 18-wheeler parked in the lane.”

The pilot project is to run until the 2015 completion of an environmental assessment studying the possibility of permanent lanes. The pilot also includes a complementary westbound lane on Richmond St. W., likely to be completed in the next month.

The Adelaide lane runs from Bathurst St. to Simcoe St. Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, chair of the public works committee, said he has received calls from cyclists who are happy that the lane has given them a safe downtown route.

“The cycling community — it doesn’t matter what you put in, there will never be uniform agreement on the solution selected. There’s always some group that’s unhappy,” Minnan-Wong said.