I am privileged to live in…

I am privileged to live in an area on downtown Toronto where cycling, walking, public transit and driving are all viable options, and I find myself constantly negotiating between these modes of transportation. Small incentives to opt for one over the other makes a big difference. Over the past 5 years, I've seen myself gravitating towards biking as infrastructure became more ubiquitous and increased my comfort commuting by bike.

Bike infrastructure decreases the barrier to entry for making cycling a go-to mode of transportation. For example, my commute to work via cycling used to require zigzagging through residential roads as advised by a coworker. Each new destination required research, and adding stops for errands in between was intimidating and required planing. Now that main arteries (ie. Bloor, College) have bike lanes, cycling to novel destinations is far more accessible. It's for this reason that I find myself gravitating towards biking south of Bloor and reach for the car north of Bloor.

Furthermore, it makes sense that roads with many small businesses on them are friendly to pedestrian and bike traffic. It's not practical to build parking infrastructure for cars next to these businesses, so incentivizing pedestrian, public transit and cycling and disincentivizing driving on these roads is beneficial for small businesses as well.

The decrease of traffic lanes for the creation of bike lanes is not a zero sum game. The human-scale and form factor of bikes means that a bike lane has to capacity to transport more people per square foot than a car can (especially when seating one person per car). Any incentive to nudge people to choose cycling over driving could therefore have positive impacts for traffic overall. For example, if people only choose to make trips by car when they absolutely had to (ie. transporting cargo larger than a bike could), car traffic would improve for all as well.

As a driver and someone whose work relies on driving large vehicles around the city, I appreciate how bike lanes keep cyclists separate from traffic and adds predictability. I have different routes for each mode of transportation and understand that driving in the downtown core is a privilege not a right.

Other cities (like Hong Kong) are designed so that cars and bikes do not share the road in the first place. While this is no longer an option for us, the solution to the problems with bike lanes is to improve them and continue to make them a more attractive mode of transportation, not remove them. For example, if bike lanes are not used in the winter because they are not plowed, then they should be properly plowed (I find that it's often down well and quality in downtown Toronto, so biking is still my preferred method of transportation in the winter!).

All of the above points are logistical reasons to keep bike lanes that reduce traffic lanes under municipal jusrisdiction, not even considering the myriad of health and environmental benefits that arise from increasing a municipality's bikeability.