evandyk
Senior Member
Especially when 2 of the 4 lanes were parking for 22 hours of the day.
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Cycling infrastructure (Separated bike lanes)
- Thread starter MetroMan
- Start date
turbanplanner
Senior Member
Minus the dedicated curb cutouts which aren’t travel lanes there was no parking allowed on the new section
afransen
Senior Member
The trouble is that we are driving development onto all the potential car priority roads. So Toronto's plan is to have zero car priority roads (leaving aside highways), or to force tens of thousands of people to live in condos on busy car priority roads. It's kind of insane, to my mind.
TTCdinosaur
New Member
I say let Fordlandia continue to think driving an Escalade to eat pancakes at that one restaurant is culture.
generalcanada
Senior Member
is it derogatory to call someone a carbrain?
turbanplanner
Senior Member
Stuff like this is when the blue hair people protest ford in person, it’ll wave off opposition as “crazy people”
max
Active Member
Minus the car travel lanes, there's no where for cars! Where will it end!
MisterF
Senior Member
There's no good reason for them to stop anywhere. Mississauga is building an extensive cycling network of its own after all, even if it is mostly poorly designed.
4.4% as Northern Light mentioned. And that's only going to go up.
Travel habits are adjusting to the new cycling infrastructure, which is the subject of this entire thread. Travel times are certainly not way up in the bike lanes. Or the subway, which has far more capacity than anything on the surface. And car travel times being up is mostly limited to specific locations and likely temporary.
Canadians love to use winter as an excuse for the status quo. But the reality is that when cycling infrastructure is separated from traffic and ploughed in the winter, people use it all year. Just like sidewalks.
Northern Light
Superstar
Well, now.......aren't we actually driving the majority of the development to where the subways/higher-order rail are located?
Yonge, University, Downtown, Bloor, Danforth, Sheppard, next to major stations along the Spadina corridor (St. Clair West, Lawrence West, Yorkdale, Downsview Park etc......... and along Eglinton (transit pending)...
It just so happens those rails tend to align with major roads, since that's how we laid out most of the subway system.
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turbanplanner
Senior Member
I’m pointing out there was no illegal parking in this new stretch. I’ll do my recording next week and see what sort of volume we see.Minus the car travel lanes, there's no where for cars! Where will it end!
I can’t record trip times but it’ll be interesting to see if habits have actually changed
TRONto
Active Member
Winter is no longer an excuse for Toronto at least. We barely got snow this year (thank you climate change?). This has been my best winter by far for biking.
max
Active Member
Illegal parking is everywhere, abandon your car in a live traffic lane if you don't believe me.
slicecom
Active Member
Yeah our winters are so overblown. I average less than 5 days a year where I don't bike due to snow. We barely get any snow here. I think a lot of people who live to the away from the waterfront don't realize how little snow we actually get downtown. I miss more days due to rain than I do due to cold or snow.
allengeorge
Senior Member
It’s worthwhile to evaluate what we can do to get car traffic to flow smoother. Some ideas have been mentioned previously: removing stop lights, synchronizing lights, reconfiguring lanes etc. In other words, changes that can be made without ripping out bike lanes. It sounds like the city is considering some of this, while on others (traffic lights) we’re going in the wrong direction.
Also, given Toronto’s growth it’s impossible to service people’s transport needs using single occupant cars. We should be shifting as much of traffic off cars and onto other modes (transit, bikes, walking) so that the people who do have to use cars have a better commute. And that shift will take time.
For bikes specifically, I will simply say that there are three things that hinder usage: perception about when we can bike, safety, and an underbuilt network. On the first, people complain a lot about winter, but, we get far less snow than we jaw about. @slicecom is right: rain is a far bigger pain. Geographically and weather-wise, Toronto is actually a pretty reasonable to bike around. Next, the lack of a protected bike network make it hard to drive modal shift. I’m an avid cyclist, but I’ve had some janky calls on city streets. I would be very, very sketchy about biking around in unprotected lanes with my kids. If you don’t offer people safe options, you’re going to depress usage. Finally, the protected bike network that exists is pretty patchy, and that too depresses usage. Unfortunately, building out bike lanes is often tied to street reconstructions, which are geographically disjoint - and so you have projects that feel odd in synchronizing.
I guess at the end of the day I think it’s short-sighted to simply look at one bike lane, its usage today and say “It’s not highly used - let’s shut it down”. It ignores its value to the overall network, and a vision about what we want our city to look like and its modal shift to be.
Also, given Toronto’s growth it’s impossible to service people’s transport needs using single occupant cars. We should be shifting as much of traffic off cars and onto other modes (transit, bikes, walking) so that the people who do have to use cars have a better commute. And that shift will take time.
For bikes specifically, I will simply say that there are three things that hinder usage: perception about when we can bike, safety, and an underbuilt network. On the first, people complain a lot about winter, but, we get far less snow than we jaw about. @slicecom is right: rain is a far bigger pain. Geographically and weather-wise, Toronto is actually a pretty reasonable to bike around. Next, the lack of a protected bike network make it hard to drive modal shift. I’m an avid cyclist, but I’ve had some janky calls on city streets. I would be very, very sketchy about biking around in unprotected lanes with my kids. If you don’t offer people safe options, you’re going to depress usage. Finally, the protected bike network that exists is pretty patchy, and that too depresses usage. Unfortunately, building out bike lanes is often tied to street reconstructions, which are geographically disjoint - and so you have projects that feel odd in synchronizing.
I guess at the end of the day I think it’s short-sighted to simply look at one bike lane, its usage today and say “It’s not highly used - let’s shut it down”. It ignores its value to the overall network, and a vision about what we want our city to look like and its modal shift to be.
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turbanplanner
Senior Member
People don't park illegal there as there is plenty of parking AND there isn't really anything to stop for, it's an issue further east but not this section.
I worked at richmond near university, I'd have a good view of 2 cycle lanes. The usage wouldn't be zero but it would be a lot lower than the summer.
At the end of the day people want to get around comfortably.
I don't necessarily disagree with what everyone is saying, it's just funny this is the only system we will build for demand 10 years from now or "wait for patterns to shift" Nobody can give a ballpark of how many car trips can we slow down to speed up x number of bike trips, or what's a fair time period to see if demand has shifted.