17 Comments
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Susan Noakes's avatar

Just came back from Brisbane, where there are protected bike lanes everywhere. Both banks of the river devoted to parklands and bike lanes. Not disconnected like Toronto waterfront, but contiguous. No less than 3 bridges just for bikes and pedestrians.

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Steve Hanley's avatar

Fossil fuels are a religion and most of us are more than happy to drink the Kool Aid, just like Jim Jones' followers did.

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Adrian Levin's avatar

Bravo!!! Reality is here and can’t be disregarded!

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Geoffrey Tanner's avatar

Lloyd, I am 100% with you on the whole bike lane thing. More bike lanes! However.. My understanding is that DoFo wants to rip out a section on Bloor in Etobicoke. Is that not correct? If it is, I think it's a little disingenuous of cycle Toronto to use a study of a very different section of the bike lane to push back. Again, I'm not for removal of bike lanes ANYWHERE but I hate seeing activists making easy to rebut arguments!

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Lloyd Alter's avatar

no he wants to take them out for the entire distance from etobicoke to Queens Park.

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Geoffrey Tanner's avatar

Wow, that is truly outrageous!

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coj1's avatar

What exactly is taking out the bike lanes going to do for cars? Looking at the picture, is there even enough room to put in a center lane, if even another two lanes?

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Lloyd Alter's avatar

The bike lane on the other side of the street is wider and fully separated. This particular section is narrow and painted because there wasn’t enough room, but it is right in front of a bike shop where they could set up on the second floor for the count.

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Geoffrey Tanner's avatar

He's not taking it out to benefit cars. He's taking it out to rouse his base.

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coj1's avatar

From everything I understand from this site, his base is people who own cars.

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Geoffrey Tanner's avatar

Exactly. And a lot of drivers are way more swayed by hating on cyclists than on the actual result of policies. We live in an age when anger and hate always get the front row seats.

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coj1's avatar

As a driver, I would rather that the person on a bicycle had their own lane. Keeps them out of the way, except for when they are running stop signs and red lights. Saw three examples today.

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Lloyd Alter's avatar

We agree!

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Geoffrey Tanner's avatar

I notice that car loving bike haters love to point it out every time a cyclist reaks the rules as if that says something about cyclists in general. By that logic, I guess I should be saying that all car drivers are dangerous because of the way that 3% of them drive!

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coj1's avatar

That would be true if I did see more than 3 people on bikes!

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coj1's avatar

"“Officially, e-bikes that can be operated without pedalling are not allowed by city by-laws in protected bike lanes, such as on the south side of Bloor, however, our objective was to determine bike lane usage without having to make judgments about who should and should not be in the bike lane.”"

Why would you count something that is illegal? So if a car would drive in a bike lane, I guess they would have counted it. I hate to say this, but this really can't be used as a study for bike lane use. Who knows if the illegal users were more than the legal users.

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coj1's avatar

"...that only 1.2% of Torontonians commute by bike, the study showed that during the afternoon rush hours, bikes, including e-bikes and other micro mobility devices, represented over 50% of all vehicular traffic."

Are these two points actually talking about the same thing?

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