The Globe and Mail -- Biking in the City

Want to make a difference for cyclists? Start a war

John Barber -- jbarber@globeandmail.com

September 9, 2008

One week last year, Janet Sadik-Khan, New York's new transportation commissioner, visited Copenhagen to study bikeways. Impressed by a system that gives cyclists their own lanes protected by wide buffers - lanes taken away from cars - she returned home determined to emulate it.

"Thirty days later they had it," activist Gil Penalosa told Toronto council's works committee yesterday. The city removed two lanes of parked and moving cars from Ninth Avenue in the Chelsea district, replacing them with one bicycle lane and a generous no-go buffer zone between it and the remaining motorized lanes. Just like that.

Last month, Ms. Sadik-Khan earned raves for another quick-and-dirty initiative that closed Park Avenue to motorized traffic, from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park, for three consecutive Sundays. At the same time, city crews are tearing up the entire length of Broadway, removing driving lanes and parking in favour of generous bike lanes protected by broad landscaped buffers.

Over the same period, Paris flooded its famous boulevards with a fleet of 24,000 bicycles for the use of any citizen with a euro in their pocket. Simply creating the stations to accommodate the fleet required the elimination of 7,000 parking spaces, according to Mr. Penalosa, director of the group Walk and Bike for Life.

Over the same period in Toronto, however, local bureaucrats struggled to persuade suburban councillors to accept bicycle lanes on a handful of obscure routes. While great cities around the world compete with bold strokes to reclaim their streets for pedestrians and cyclists - as parks commissioner of Bogota in the 1990s, Mr. Penalosa helped create 320 kilometres of separate bikeways - Toronto quails at the challenge of painting new stripes on Annette Street.

Yesterday's debate, dominated by doubters to whom the so-called bicycle advocates happily deferred, was enough to dash recent hope that Toronto's torpor was over. Under the fresh leadership of Councillor Adrian Heaps, and with the help of new fast-track rules, council's cycling committee had promised big changes. But yesterday, Mr. Heaps's only role was to encourage the indefinite deferral of long-planned bike lanes for Horner Avenue in southern Etobicoke.

What we need is a big gesture, a thorough makeover of a major street with unapologetic impacts on drivers. The current strategy, which aims to remake the city without risking actual change, is an absurdity.

Consider the bureaucrats' assurance that none of the proposals before committee yesterday would have "significant impact" on existing traffic. But if Toronto's ambitious bike plan is to succeed, noted Ron Fletcher of the Toronto Bicycle Network, by definition it must have significant impact on traffic. Otherwise, what's the point?

What we need more than anything, of course, is the kind of leadership that such figures as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë have displayed in their forthright campaigns to de-motorize their cities.

"We need doers," Mr. Penalosa emphasized repeatedly. "We need people doing things." Consensus is impossible, he added, and compromise often worse than doing nothing. "We don't have time to think," he insisted. "We have to do."

Suburban councillors decry what they call city hall's "war against the car." If only! In truth, this is a phony war, with hesitating bureaucrats filling in for absent generals while a fearful mayor shirks in the rear.

What we need is a real war to make it clear where we all stand.