Comment 39259

By rusty (registered) - website | Posted March 29, 2010 at 14:06:16

This morning I was biking around in Toronto. As most of you will know, Toronto transit doesn't do diagonal very well (I don't think the HSR does either :) ). My first run was St Lawrence Market to Sherbourne/Gerrard. Not a problem - a painted bike path all the way up Sherbourne! Not very well paved and a ridiculous number of traffic lights but - hey - I had my own path so I'm not complaining.

The next leg was a little trickier: Sherbourne/Gerrard to Lakeshore/Bay. As one or two posters here have noted - when the bike lane network vanishes it is not an incentive to bike. From Sherbourne I veered south to Shuter, took the bike path from there to Yonge and then, well, then I was on my own. As Ryan suggested, I took up the whole lane down Yonge and, once at Front had to run across a few sidewalks to make it to the office. God knows how I'm going to weave my way home (no bike paths at all, unless I go down to QueensQuay and back up again...).

Some learnings for me from my little trip:

  1. Bike paths - even crappy faded painted ones - are better than nothing. In fact, even the chevron markings are OK, as at least they remind traffic to steer clear. Ultimately it would be nice to get dedicated lanes but let's be realistic, paint the network first, see the cycling traffic increase, and then build it out from there.

  2. An integrated network is essential. If I wasn't a seasoned cyclist I would not have ridden today. Zipping down Yonge and along Lakeshore (is that even allowed?) is not for the faint-hearted. And no Councilor Minnan-Wong, I don't want to pedal 3 blocks out of my way to use the existing 'network'.

Keep up the great discussion folks :)

Ben Bull. Cap'n Bully has a new Blog! http://bullysmoviereviews.blogspot.ca/ or something like that.

Permalink | Context

Events Calendar

There are no upcoming events right now.
Why not post one?

Recent Articles

Article Archives

Blog Archives

Site Tools

Feeds