Vaughan Pedestrian and Bicycle Master Plan
Renewed Commitment

NRU
March 28, 2018
Mark Lay

The City of Vaughan’s scheduled community consultations on its new pedestrian and bicycle master plan concluded this month. While encouraged by the city’s efforts to update its infrastructure, some advocates remain skeptical that construction will follow adoption of the new plan.

Through the consultation process, residents and advocacy groups commented on the current state of cycling in the city and offered suggestions focused on increasing the number of bike lanes and improving route connectivity.

The city has approved transportation master plans offering increased cycling development before—2007 and again in 2012—but the results were disappointing to both residents and councillors.

“Past experience has not been good,” said Ward 5 councillor Alan Shefman, who chaired the task force that led to the city’s current planning process. He says this will chart a path that is both effective and reasonable.

Shefman told NRU that the allocation of about $908,612 as a first-year grant through the Ontario Municipal Commuter Cycling program, with the potential for future allocations, along with attention from community advocates, has encouraged the city to move forward with the master plan.

“It took community activism to push [the master plan] back to the forefront,” said York Region Cycling Coalition chair Michael Iacovelli, echoing Shefman’s views.

“The biggest hurdle by far is connectivity,” said Iacovelli, describing the overall inability for cyclists to crossover between the city’s east and west corridors, making travel between some streets unsafe.

“On Keele [Street] there is a 100-metre bike lane where nothing is connected to anything,” said Vaughan Bicycle User Group spokesperson Odette McIntyre. She added that attempting to use freestanding bike lanes that lack connections to other roads can put cyclists in a dangerous limbo.

Previous community feedback in 2015 emphasized similar concerns about cycling, in that case pointing to a lack of safe connections to cross over Highway 400.

Both Iacovelli and McIntyre want more bike lanes constructed, particularly ones that lead to the city’s new subway stations, along with better connections and crossovers for existing routes. Where the two differ is in their confidence that the City of Vaughan will undertake the types of development needed.

“It’s just ink on paper,” said McIntyre. She believes that the few tangible results in cycling-related development following both the 2007 and 2012 plans will be a continued pattern. McIntyre said that she and other cyclists have been waiting 10 years for cycling infrastructure already. [Views of Vaughan’s current cycling system can be see through York Region’s interactive cycling map.]

Iacovelli is more hopeful about the future of cycling in Vaughan.

“There is real movement towards developing a master plan,” he said. Iacovelli believes that actions like the appointment of a transportation project manager underscore the city’s intention to create a strategy and then implement it.

McIntyre added that seeing new construction underway would eliminate doubts about the city’s commitment.

“I’d love to see something by June,” said Shefman on his hopes for the completion of the master plan, but added that a final version may not be completed until the fall.