I am a senior citizen living…

I am a senior citizen living on Bloor street, on the Etobicoke side of the Humber bridge. The new bike lanes go right by my building. I enjoy using them, and do so frequently, but I also drive on Bloor and am well aware of the traffic situation there. I’ll comment on the latter below.

While I generally feel much safer biking since the lanes went in, the most important point I want to emphasize is how the bike lanes on the Humber bridge have vastly improved the local Bloor street environment.

Prior to the installation of the bike lanes, that stretch of Bloor had a major problem with traffic speeding, consistently well over the limit. The police would regularly set up there and ticket drivers, but this had no effect other than when police were actually present. No sane biker would risk their life on the bridge, with two lanes of speeding traffic in each direction. It was even worrisome being a pedestrian on the bridge, with traffic whizzing by right next to you, not to mention pedestrians dodging the bikes that had moved to the sidewalk there because the roads felt unsafe. Also, the constant noise from speeding cars was genuinely oppressive, whenever I would try to sit out on my balcony.

Since the bike lanes went in, traffic now goes at a reasonable (and much less noisy) speed, walking over the bridge feels much safer, and bikers aren’t taking their lives in their hands crossing the Humber river. And of course, Bloor is really the only place bikes can cross the river, so diverting bikes off Bloor isn’t feasible.

As a driver, I’m also well aware that eastbound traffic now backs up at rush hour from South Kingsway to the Humber Bridge. This certainly adds to the time it takes me to drive to Bloor West Village. Going downtown though, I actually find that commute times haven’t significantly changed – congestion seems to have simply moved west to my neighbourhood from the High Park and Bloor West neighbourhoods, where traffic now runs more freely.

But to blame this all on the bike lanes is simplistic. One part of the problem is that we’ve temporarily lost a lane due to condo construction on Bloor, west of Jane. But the real issue is that there is now a very short turning lane for traffic turning right onto South Kingsway. And when that lane fills up because of cars pausing for pedestrians, all eastbound traffic stops. There is surely room to greatly improve the design of that intersection, without eliminating the bike lanes. For example, the left turn lane (which gets little use) on Bloor for eastbound traffic services several streets to the west of South Kingsway. All those streets connect, so prohibiting left turns onto one of them and taking out that part of the left turn lane wouldn’t stop residents turning into another of the streets. This would create room to lengthen the turning lane on Bloor leading to South Kingsway. Probably there are other ways to improve that intersection as well – my point is that the real problem is a single poorly designed intersection, that creates a bottleneck.