The Final Word on Toronto's Bike Lane Debate (as if)

Plus 11 easy ways to make our streets safer

I know, I know, how could there be anything novel to be said about Toronto’s bike lanes?

Please be patient with the excessive length, but my hope is this extended effort will provide you with i) useful primary research, ii) some data to chew on, and iii) a simple path that our Premier, Mayor and Police Chief could follow to mitigate the unnecessary risk-taking that’s occurring each and every minute on our city streets.

If you doubt how life-changing a sunny weekend bike ride can be, look no further than my friend, Venture Capitalist (VC) John Ruffolo. Mr. Ruffolo was cycling near Major Mackenzie Drive in Markham in 2020 when he was hit by a transport truck, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

When I think about Toronto’s bike lane tug-of-war, I cannot ignore that – despite his inspiring daily commitment to active recovery – Mr. Ruffolo may well spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. One must ask the question, out of sheer respect: If we don’t support hardened cycling infrastructure in our city, are we invariably condemning others to the Ruffolo family’s collective fate – or worse?

That’s the position of journalist John Lorinc, who wrote recently that “somewhere in this city, there’s a cyclist going about their business who will die in a terrible accident — perhaps sooner, perhaps later — because [Premier] Doug Ford thinks his campaign to remove bike lanes will make for an excellent wedge issue in the forthcoming provincial election.”

There are certainly those who believe we need far more protected bike tracks. Joey Schwartz, who helped organize a “ghost ride” in honour of a recent fatal accident, argues that “every single one of these crashes, these [cyclist] deaths, did not need to happen.”

Unfortunately, the media report didn’t outline Mr. Schwartz’s advice about how, exactly, we could achieve that worthy goal — leaving it to me to attempt to fill in that glaring hole.

Mr. Ruffolo laments the politicization of bike lanes, but recognizes that, like most civic issues, it’s not a simple topic: “Traffic in Toronto sucks! Public transit sucks!” He’s all too aware that “cars, trucks and bikes don’t mix, and when they do, someone is going to die – and its usually the cyclist.”

Mr. Ruffolo and I became close through our shared venture investments and frank approach to problem-solving (as well as a love for Pearl Jam {see representative prior post “What's with you and Pearl Jam? VIII” Sept 1-23}), which makes it appropriate I think to approach this tempestuous topic from a data standpoint. Less emotion, more analysis!

When a VC gets pitched on a new idea, the entrepreneur usually opens the meeting by outlining “the problem they’re trying to solve.” Which makes it an appropriate place to start on this topic.

Advocates of cycling infrastructure believe there are clear benefits, including improved cyclist safety, personal health, reductions in carbon and noise emissions, as well as reduced traffic congestion. Can one accept these advantages at face value, whether they accrue to 1% or 3% of the population (or all of us, in the case of reduced carbon emissions), while still asking: at what cost?

Safety is Mr. Lorinc’s irrefutable “money shot” argument, so let’s start by looking at some national data.

In 2022, 52% of Canada’s road fatalities occurred in rural areas. Mr. Ruffolo himself was hit on a well-paved but quasi-country road, and there’s no practical way to reorient Canada’s rural roads to accommodate traditional cycling infrastructure. That leaves us talking about how we spend taxpayer dollars in the hopes of avoiding losses of certain urban lives (cyclists), over others (191 homeless Torontonians died in 2022, for example; my Oct. 16th Toronto Star column offered a partial, if currently unfunded, solution to that civic horror).

All of those who despise urban bike lanes need to face the fact that bike safety has improved over time – coincident with the national campaign to build out cycling infrastructure in Canada’s larger cities (unless you want to argue that an apparent decrease in bike usage since the 90s is partly at work). Between 2010 and 2022, the number of Canadian cycling deaths dropped 26 per cent, from 62 to 46 per annum, while motor vehicle fatalities similarly fell 22 per cent, from 1,622 to 1,268. One has to assume that broader application of sophisticated safety features within motor vehicles accounts for the 22% decrease.

No technological parallels can be made regarding bike safety (including helmet use, for example), which means that added bike infrastructure, as well as increased awareness, must be helping.

It’s worth noting that motorcyclists haven’t been so lucky, as deaths in that mode category rose 34 per cent during the same period – more than erasing the lives saved in the pedal bike category. One has to wonder why we don’t seem fussed that a motorcyclist was 8.8 times more likely to die than a motor vehicle occupant (based on 2022 registration data).

Given the small carbon footprint and clear affordability, shouldn’t we mitigate a motorcycle’s apparent riskiness, in an effort to encourage broader use?

If society is truly interested in saving lives, while also reducing our collective carbon footprint, why have our municipal leaders prohibited motorcycles from using Toronto’s bike lanes, for example? How can we justify this ban when five times as many Canadian fathers, mothers and young people were killed on motorcycles (258) in 2022 as were lost on bikes (46)?

Is it inflammatory to ask if a pedal bike cyclist’s life is more valuable than the motorized one? It shouldn’t be.

Just as City Council was extending the Bloor Street West bike lanes to Runnymede Road, Toronto Police recorded twelve motorcyclist deaths on local roads in 2021, compared to a single fatal bike accident.

Could it be that cyclists are a more potent lobby group, with key allies on the NDP/Liberal-dominated Toronto & East York Community Council? (Cycling lobby groups do seem to historically favour certain political parties over others.) Or is it simply that, if we were to have motorcycles travelling at the posted speed limit within a protected bike lane, the lane’s utility to the cyclist evaporates?

If so, why does Toronto City Council permit an unregistered 265 pound electric-powered food delivery moped to hurdle down a bike lane at 30 or 40 km/hr, provided it has affixed pedals? While this so-called “loophole” means your UberEats order arrives faster, is a 224 pound gas-powered licenced / insured Honda Grom motorcycle more of a threat to cyclists – travelling at the same speed – than an unlicenced / uninsured yet environmentally-friendly moped that’s actually 18% heavier?

Has the cycling fraternity crash-tested this moped vs. motorcycle theory?

Moreover, who thought it was a good idea to open-up bikes lanes to a uninsured College student (be they a Canadian Citizen or Student Visa holder) who doesn’t need an Ontario driver’s licence to operate a 265 pound moped? A byproduct of which is that the police can’t apply any demerit points in the event this moped driver gets caught running a red light at Yonge/Bloor and runs over a Mother pushing a baby stroller. Leaving aside the clear unfunded civil liability and associated medical/Physio bills that may not be covered by the perp given the absence of insurance.

But I digress. You could argue that anyone who rides a motorcycle on Toronto’s streets knows the outsized risks they are taking, but I suppose the same could be said about anyone who bikes to work for exercise, rather than burning those same calories on a Peloton in the safe confines of their home.

According to the City of Toronto, the number of “serious” cycling injuries dropped by almost one per month between 2016 and 2023; one would expect that the new cycling infrastructure played a positive role. Was “one fewer serious injury a month” what City Council promised the voters who funded the additional new bike lanes? Particularly when, during that same period, more than 1,500 Canadian motorcyclists quietly died on our roads.

City Hall’s Vision Zero leader, Sheyda Saneinejad, would have us believe their strategy is working and that “fatal collisions on Toronto's streets have been declining generally since 2016,” but that’s not true. A single Toronto cyclist lost their life in 2023…the exact same figure as 2016.

And while that’s one too many, it’s also true that Toronto taxpayers built 228 kms of dedicated bicycle lanes and cycle tracks over that same seven-year period – without reducing the number of lives lost.

You probably didn’t know that.

And it wasn’t just bike lanes. Toronto Council also passed a motion in 2019 to lower speed limits across the city. Our Transportation Dept. took the order so seriously that my own street’s sign was changed from 40 to 30 km/h as a result – despite being a dead-end road that’s less than 300 yards long.

Which makes it all the more shocking that six cyclists have died so far this year. Despite hardened new cycling infrastructure, new speed enforcement cameras, new red light cameras, tens of millions spent on new traffic calming measures, plus lower speed limits across most of the jurisdiction.

How is it possible that, after all these efforts, 2024 will be “the deadliest year in nearly two decades?”

The answer is obvious to some: “build more dedicated bike lanes!” That might work, but 97-99% of us aren’t commuter cyclists.

Do we not also worry about the life of the Torontonian who was waiting for the ambulance that I posted in this December 2023 video? No amount of flashing lights or blaring sirens made it any easier for these emergency responders to travel north on Yonge Street at Macpherson Avenue on that particular day. Our dedicated EMS crew was temporarily trapped by vehicle traffic that was unable to get out of the way due to Yonge Street’s newly-installed hardened bike lane barriers.

The video went viral via my Twitter account, logged >650,000 views, and was picked-up by the Toronto Sun newspaper. A CUPE Local 416 Paramedic told The Sun’s journalist that “a picture or in this case, a video, is worth a thousand words. Confirming, that such bike lanes, with dividing barriers, drastically impair paramedics ability to respond to life threatening calls during heavy traffic.”

The cycling Twitterati are very active, and they assured me at the time that this Paramedic Union Rep’s view wasn’t widely shared within the emergency responder community.

Sure enough, Toronto’s then-Deputy Fire Chief Jim Jessop told a public meeting just a few weeks ago that emergency response times were better following the construction of Etobicoke’s portion of the Bloor Street West bike lane. This perspective was at odds with that of his old boss, then Fire Chief Matthew Pegg, who anticipated in May 2020 that response times would suffer if the Bloor Street West bike lanes were made permanent.

Something an “internal TFS report” (made available via FOI to The Toronto Star) has since confirmed:

The FOI documents also reveal that TFS conducted internal research that found delays in areas where bike lanes had previously been installed….

The internal TFS report also concluded that the amount of time it takes trucks to travel from the station to the scene of the alarm — the amount of time spent on the road — did increase after the bike lanes were installed on Bloor between Shaw and Runnymede.

It found that between 2019 and 2022, travel times inside the bike lane area increased 52 seconds, from 257 seconds to 309 seconds. Events outside the area saw an increase in travel times of 40 seconds, from 322 seconds to 362 seconds.

Now, depending on your view, response times are either twelve or 52 seconds worse, on average, per emergency call, courtesy of the additional bike lanes. If we work with the more conservative twelve second figure, assume that just 20% of runs are impacted by bike lanes, and multiply that by Toronto Fire’s 321,795 different emergency calls in 2023 (the most recent data), TFS response times were delayed by an aggregate of 12,872 minutes last year.

One must also expect that Toronto’s Paramedic Services saw a similar twelve second impact (I’ve seen no specific data from the Paramedics reflecting bike lane-related changes in response times): that agency expected 352,000 requests for service in 2023, which extrapolates (also applying the 20% factor) to 14,080 minutes of bike lane-attributed delays for our ambulance crews.

Taken together, these two agencies spent an estimated 27,000 additional minutes in traffic in 2023 thanks to Toronto’s bike lanes (using 2022 vs. 2019 TFS data). As the Toronto bike lane build-out began as far back as 2001, with Vision Zero formally beginning in 2016, there may be incremental response time delays that aren’t captured in the TFS 2019-22 analysis.

Cycling infrastructure advocates will argue that we shouldn’t aggregate the delays, as each emergency call is independent of the other. Fair enough.

What the twelve second average delay doesn’t surface is that there’s likely been no bike lane impact on emergency response times at 10 pm or 6am, for example. Traffic is just much lighter during those periods, which makes it easy to get your car or minivan out of the way if a TFS Pumper truck or Paramedic van is approaching you as it heads to a cardiac arrest call. As we see with our very own eyes every day during busy traffic windows, the serious delays happen at 2:01 pm, for example: are they 30, 60 seconds per call? 180 seconds sometimes?

Can we at least agree that it's a lot more than twelve seconds?

That Toronto Paramedic Union Rep’s anecdote from December 18^th last year confirms what we all see (despite the politically-correct media interviews of certain EMS leaders): “that such bike lanes, with dividing barriers, drastically impair paramedics ability to respond to life threatening calls during heavy traffic.”

I stress the “dividing barriers” point.

The issue for me isn’t “cycling infrastructure,” as applied on Beacon Street in the bike-friendly Boston suburb of Brookline, for example, but the hardened barrier version that we see on Toronto’s Yonge Street. The version that prevents motorists from complying with Ontario’s Move Over law (Section 159 of the Highway Traffic Act requires drivers to pull over when an emergency vehicle with flashing lights approaches).

Hardened bike lanes were to be the difference between life and death for our cyclists. Except for the impolitic reality that the stats don’t yet support this expectation: a single Toronto cyclist lost their life in 2023; the same as in 2016.

That said, the number of “major” cycling injuries dropped by just under one per month between 2016 and 2023; if we assume that improvement was entirely due to the bike lanes Toronto added during that period, was that reduction worth Toronto’s Fire and Paramedic services spending an additional 27,000 minutes in traffic last year?

This is where cycling infrastructure advocates justifiably shout: “Just think of how bad it would be if we didn’t have those bike lanes!” There’s no way to contest that point, just as there’s no way of discounting that several heart attack victims died last year as a result of 27,000 minutes of bike lane-related response time delays.

How many defibrillators arrived too late to do their magic? Zero? I doubt it.

In fact, according to an Audit of Toronto’s Paramedic response times, ambulance response times have dropped meaningfully since 2019:

In addition, we reviewed the average ambulance and dispatch response times for the highest acuity patients and noted that they increased over the last five years. In particular, the ambulance response times for the highest acuity (sudden cardiac arrest and CTAS 1) patients had increased by five per cent and seven per cent, respectively.

It’s interesting that we’ve not heard much about the fact that ambulance response times met the “legislated eight minute” target 85% of the time in 2019, but only 79% of the time in 2023. How much of that is due to added bike lanes, EMS staffing shortages, a growing population, vehicles, etc.?

Why should we care about a few minutes here and there?

According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), “most people who have a cardiac arrest do not receive treatment quickly enough to survive. A person whose heart stops must get help within 10 minutes.” Even if you realized what was happening and called 911 all within 30 seconds, it’ll take another 15 seconds to explain the emergency (chewing up 45 seconds of that 10 minute maximum window). As my random Yonge Street video showed, if your parent was in the midst of a heart attack as that ambulance struggled to arrive with a defibrillator, wasting 30 seconds at every other intersection could represent the difference between life and death for your loved one.

The difference between Ontario’s “legislated eight minute” response time and the NIH’s “10 minute” defibrillator requirement is just 120 seconds. The recent audit found Toronto’s Paramedic’s missed their eight minute target 21% of the time, and you’ll likely spent 45 of those 120 buffer seconds ensuring that help is on the way as your parent or grandparent goes into cardiac arrest while watching kids play House League hockey at Etobicoke’s Central Arena.

Why are we discussing more lane barriers, instead of fixing degrading emergency response times? Surely the latter would save more lives than anything we might do for “commuter cyclists.”

With that backdrop, I may not even need to remind everyone that five times as many Toronto families were impacted by motorcycle fatalities last year as cycling. Why don’t we seem to care? Why do bikes get exclusive use of the 228 kms of protected lanes – even in the dead of winter, or late at night, when they’re largely unused?

Did those motorcyclists deserve to die? I hope that no one harbors that view. Maybe nothing can be done to prevent motorcycle deaths, but our collective focus on saving some from injury versus others is noted, particularly when 100 per cent of Toronto’s midtown residents and workers now suffer from reduced emergency response times between, say, 8am and 7pm. Twelve months a year.

Cycling advocates and their political allies seem certain of their moral and numeric high ground, just the same.

In early November, the Globe and Mail’s Alex Bozikovic took to Twitter to post a short video clip of the Bloor Street eastbound bike lane (at Spadina). Nov. 4^th was an unusually warm morning at 8:34am, and his stats were “23 vehicles and 25 cyclists, including one parent with a baby” over a three minute period. I asked him what a similar angle at 9:34am, 10:34am and 11:34am would show – is there a cycling version of “rush hour?”

His caustic response was “11:34am when traffic volumes are lower? Do you imagine this is a successful gotcha?”

He and I have crossed swords on BBTCA previously (he’s one of those who would close that 1939 airport, inconveniencing two million passengers in the process, while preserving the exclusive, taxpayer subsidized lifestyles of ~730 resident Islanders), so I knew that this Architecture journalist’s efforts warranted some critical thought:

1. Would bike vs. car data from later in the morning, let alone on a day that wasn’t “short-sleeve” weather, find different proportions?

2. Does proximity to UofT have an impact on usage in this segment of the Bloor St. bike lane? Does that matter?

3. Was three minutes a statistically significant period to record anything, given that >10 bikes can advance and bunch up while waiting for a red light to turn green (as coincidentally happened in his clip), while cars are left to queue in single file (there’s time for maybe 15 vehicles to proceed safely on any given 50-second light cycle)?

I dragged the dog over there the next morning, and figured that I’d record four times as long as my Globe counterpart. Twelve minutes would be more statistically significant, on a relative basis, anyway. To my surprise, this segment of Bloor’s separated bike lanes was still quite busy, even at 11:24am.

Not the ~50/50 proportion that Mr. Bozikovic found on the prior day, but pedal bikes did make up 28% of the combined bike + vehicle use that I recorded. There’s no denying that it was one of the warmest Fall days in Toronto history, but there’s no question that the lane was being well-used. Add-in the e-Bikes and mopeds, and combined use rose to 33% during this twelve minute window.

Of the seven Highway Traffic Act violations I observed, only one involved a car running a yellow light; I think it helps that cars can turn left at that intersection, unlike Yonge/Bloor. The balance were various ticky-tack bike and e-Bike HTA violations, although none seemed to put anyone’s life at risk – unlike what I saw in my brief time at Yonge/Bloor (this cyclist ran the red light during my 24 minute study and is lucky to be alive).

If you were to frequent the local restaurants in the Bloor/Spadina part of the City during the evening, as I do, you’ll find this same eastbound bike lane is dominated by young men driving food delivery e-Bikes. Does anything turn on that? I suspect it depends on your general view of separated bikes lanes.

Make your way over to the corner of Yonge and Bloor Streets, however, and you’ll find it’s simply the Wild West. Premier Ford’s vow to remove bike lanes from these key arteries warranted some videos of that key intersection, as well, in an effort to honour Mr. Ruffolo’s correct admonition “that we need to accommodate all forms of traffic.”

If Premier Ford and Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria suspected that Toronto’s Left-leaning City Hall had merely bowed to the bike lobby, instead of trying to make our roads and sidewalks safer for everyone, they’d have been right.

Why do I say that? Most cyclists become lawbreakers at Yonge/Bloor, and one mature Ten-Speeder almost got himself killed right in front of me (see the video above). Surely our City Councilors are well aware of what’s going on at that intersection – of any of the key traffic spots in our formally “fine city.”

According to the mantra, years of Council and Staff effort have been invested in a sincere attempt at “Vision Zero,” the allegedly….

comprehensive action plan focused on reducing traffic-related fatalities and serious injuries on Toronto’s streets. The Plan prioritizes the safety of our most vulnerable road users across seven emphasis areas through a range of extensive, proactive, targeted and data driven initiatives.

The Vision Zero Road Safety Plan is a bold pledge to improve safety across our city using a data-driven and targeted approach, focusing on the locations where improvements are most needed. The Plan addresses safety for the most vulnerable users of our transportation system—pedestrians, school children, older adults and cyclists. Based on factors that contribute to serious injury and fatality crashes, the plan will also focus on aggressive and distracted driving, safety for motorcyclists, and heavy trucks.

The City is committed to Vision Zero and upholds its fundamental message: fatalities and serious injuries on our roads are preventable, and we must strive to reduce traffic-related deaths and injuries to zero.

None of that was going on at Yonge/Bloor on the morning of November 19th.

I taped both the north and south directions for twelve minutes each, starting at 8:54am. It wasn’t Mr. Bozikovic’s 90% rush hour window (8:34am), but it was still a busy time of day.

The first thing you’ll notice is that, unlike Bloor/Spadina, the Yonge/Bloor intersection includes a 30-second “scramble” sequence. This is where pedestrians get to cross in all directions, including diagonally, requiring vehicle and bike traffic to stop in all directions. City Council rolled the idea out in 2009; and while they cancelled this rare feature at the Bay/Bloor intersection in 2013 for lack of use (define, please) and the negative “impact on traffic” (based on which metrics?), City staff have held firm on maintaining the Yonge/Bloor one.

Because “science,” no doubt.

Every third Yonge/Bloor sequence is a ‘scramble” light, which adds up to about 35 per hour at this time of day. For drivers at Toronto’s main intersection, the scramble feature translates into idling at a red light for an 17.5 additional minutes per hour. When combined with the delays that came with the Bloor and Yonge bike lane installations, no wonder traffic feels clogged-up in this part of town relative to fifteen years ago!

For all the complaints about condo construction, road maintenance, or population growth, serious traffic delays flow from these two defining road use changes (scramble and bike lanes); changes that the present/prior members of the NDP/Liberal-dominated Toronto and East York Community Council continue to support.

I was able to capture eight different southbound (and E/W) traffic light sequences, along with seven pedestrian scramble cycles, in the first twelve-minute period. For the northbound route, I got eight different northbound sequences, along with seven E/W and pedestrian scramble cycles, in the second twelve-minute period.

The data highlights from the north and south Yonge/Bloor observations are as follows:

1. 9 pedal-type bikes (plus zero e-Bikes) were observed going southbound, and just 3 bikes (plus 2 e-Bikes) travelling northbound, during each direction’s 12 minute segment.

2. 60 vehicles were observed going southbound, with 40 vehicles travelling northbound (including a TFS truck slowly returning from a call).

3. In aggregate, pedal bikes made up just 11% of the combined bike + vehicle use that I recorded. Even if you include the food delivery e-Bikes/mopeds, the bike lane usage figure grows to just 12% of combined traffic – vs. the 28% I saw at Bloor/Spadina.

4. I recorded 11 illegal kick scooters travelling through the intersection (N/S/E/W) at some point during the combined 24 minute observation.

5. City Hall may call it a “Pedestrian Priority Phase,” but the vast majority of cyclists have unilaterally determined that the scramble sequence is for their convenience, too. Many didn’t even slow down as they approached the pedestrian intersection. To my surprise, >80% of the cyclists, e-Bikes and e-Scooter users rode right through their red light during the alleged Pedestrian Priority Phase (the late Mayor Rob Ford might quip that it’s the “War on Car” Phase). What these cyclists and e-Bike riders are doing is both illegal and “dangerous,” according to City Hall:

As a cyclist, you are considered a vehicle according to the Ontario Highway Traffic Act. If you approach one of these three intersections on a bicycle and you need to make a left turn, you have two options.

Move into the appropriate lane to safely cross the intersection and turn left as a vehicle in the flow of traffic.

Dismount and walk their bike across the crosswalk as a pedestrian.

You must not cycle through a crosswalk and you must stop behind the white stop line. Being in front of the white stop line is illegal, and can be dangerous, too.

6. Of the 84 different Highway Traffic Act violations I recorded during the 24 minute observation, 89% were by bikes/e-Bikes/e-Scooters (each was both a HTA 144/136 plus a HTA 140(1) infraction - $300 fine in both cases). The nine vehicle violations were either running the yellow light, or turning right onto Bloor at a prohibited time.

Here are my takeaways:

First: If e-scooters are illegal, and their users are dying every few months, why are so many allowed to race around town?

If city officials truly want to make the streets safer, why did Council ban electric scooters, only to drop the ball on enforcement?

According to a recent Star piece, “they’re a silent menace. A total of nine people have been killed or badly injured while using the devices so far this year.” Many of these deaths could have been avoided if Toronto Police enforced the ban twelve months a year – not just for a two week blitz.

Being illegal and “dangerous,” if these devices are found to be parked on a sidewalk (which is also prohibited by law), why don’t Staff in City pick-up trucks come around and impound them, just as Parking Enforcement employees impound cars that are parked on Yonge Street during rush hour. City Hall claims to be trying to save lives, didn’t they?

This seems easy; unless of course the ban was passed merely to keep e-Scooter rental firms such as Bird and Lime from opening up shop in the GTA.

In the meantime, if TPS show up at Yonge/Bloor at 9am on Monday morning, they’ll have the chance to impound 30 dangerous scooters in the space of an hour. To parrot Mr. Lornic, “somewhere in this city, there’s an e-Scooter user going about their business who will die in a terrible accident — perhaps sooner, perhaps later — because Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw won’t enforce the law – for fear of the political power of young micromobility users.”

Second: If mopeds with pedals must be licenced in Quebec, why is that not also the case in Ontario?

This is an area within provincial jurisdiction, where Premier Ford doesn’t need to wait for either Mayor Olivia Chow or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. What the Globe recently found to be part of “an influx of micromobility in Canada that is thriving in a grey area within cities’ policies and infrastructure.”

Even The Netherlands requires e-Bikes (not just mopeds) of all shapes and sizes to be licenced!

Third: Either allow small motorcycles to use bike lanes, or apply the same ban to electric mopeds w/pedals.

Toronto currently permits moped access to bike lanes. Certain electric mopeds (with pedals) can legally reach up to 60 km/hr, which exceeds the federal standard for an e-bike’s maximum speed of 32 km/h. Slap on pedals, and they can access our bike lanes. But not the lighter, gas-powered Honda Grom.

Fourth: Install Red Light cameras at Yonge & Bloor.

I shouldn’t even have to point this out. Please fire whoever thought that they were needed at Ossington & Bloor, and Danforth & Greenwood, but not Yonge & Bloor. Based on my vehicle observations, Toronto Police could issue 20 tickets an hour just on that short stretch of Yonge alone.

Fifth: “Block the Box” is a start, but let’s extend the Traffic Enforcement Agent Campaign.

I’m all for the new City Traffic Enforcement Agents who stand around at intersections, such as Bay/Front and King/University, during rush hour. Too many selfish drivers are blocking the intersection when their traffic light changes from green to red, and people such as Ben Mulroney and I have been asking for specialized enforcement for years. I once offered to provide a private sector solution as a rev share with the City.

Annoying as vehicles “blocking the box” may be, it appears that more lives are put at risk at Yonge/Bloor every hour by scofflaw bike, e-Bike and e-Scooter users. If Toronto Police have no time for traffic enforcement due to the >1,000 “pro-Palestinian” unauthorized protests that have consumed their time over the past 13 months (see representative prior post “"No Justice" in Gaza means "No Peace" in Toronto” Mar 29-24), why don’t you deploy these Traffic Agents to enforce the HTA on these wheeled lawbreakers?

The new red light cameras will work on vehicle enforcement, given their licence plates, but bikes and the rest need personal attention.

Sixth: Why do I pay for an annual pet licence, but bikes ride for free?

Toronto requires dog and cat owners to pay $25 and $15 per annum respectively, to cover the cost of things like emergency rescue services and shelters. Why is there no similar partial/full cost recovery for cyclists or moped users? If you don’t have a valid pet licence, an ethical local Dog Walker won’t take your pet on as a furry client.

Toronto long-since gave up on bike licencing for reasons that now sound self-serving, but what a useful tool it could be. Whether we charge $1, $5 or $25/yr, it costs taxpayers to plow all of these bike lanes in the winter. Why are those new maintenance costs entirely covered by tools such as the vehicle gas tax and property taxes? More importantly, we’d have an easier time enforcing compliance of the red light at Yonge/Bloor if the city already had your name, and you had to prove you were up-to-date on your bike licence.

Enforcement could also be applied at the cycle shops, where maintenance can’t be done on any unregistered / unregistered bike (just as with the dog walkers and Toronto’s By-Law Enforcement Officers).

If we don’t do this because we want to encourage bike use, and a licence fee would undermine that societal wish, explain why the bike-crazy Dutch force their school children to take a “bike exam,” for example, and bike tourists are now required to be licenced in The Netherlands?

Progressives, such as Jennifer Keesmaat, refer to Holland as the “inspiration” of what might be possible in Toronto. We’ve got a head start on their bike lane networks, but not the exams, police enforcement nor the licencing that makes cycling work well in that part of the world.

Seventh: Combine Toronto Fire with Toronto’s Paramedic service?

Why do we roll both a fire truck and an ambulance to the same cardiac arrest call? The theory was that TFS would get there faster, and I have no reason to doubt that. Shouldn’t Paramedics ride in the back of that TFS Pumper?

Many moons ago, Mark Ferguson, the president of CUPE Local 416, asked “Why would George Smitherman commit to sending four firefighters and a half-a-million dollar pumper to a medical call when in fact he could achieve the same thing by sending two fully qualified paramedics to the call?”

Paramedics joke about the “circle of care” that patients see as they look up from their stretcher at three Firefighters and two Paramedics – do we really need six different professionals on site at that moment (the 6^th sits in the fire truck outside, ensuring it doesn’t get stolen again)? Is that the best use of our finite tax dollars?

With all the new bike lanes, perhaps a TFS Pumper is no longer the right form factor to try to navigate every cardiac arrest call. Maybe the solution isn’t a merger of the two services, but the construction of additional ambulance stations.

We should look at every option.

Eighth: Enforce Bike Head/Tail lights at night

A few evenings ago, I came up upon a Father carting his Toddler son home (in a suitable rear-mounted child seat) on his bicycle northbound on Church Street just above Carleton Street. Both had helmets on, but I barely made them out until I was maybe 10 feet behind them. Church St. is wide in a few places, but things get quite narrow between Carleton and Wellesley. This bike had no lights — not even reflectors — and if I’d hit them, the Toronto Police would have recorded it as yet another bike fatality.

There would have been no footnote on the Public Safety Data Portal about the Father’s decision to ride without lights at night being the primary factor.

Interestingly, Transport Canada has no qualms about publishing data regarding how many fatal motor vehicle accidents involve drivers (29%) or passengers (35%) who weren’t wearing seatbelts. Seems like more info on the nature of these accidents would help Torontonians better understand the root causes of 2024’s two-decade high spike in fatal cyclist accidents.

Is it all due to motor vehicle driver recklessness? If so, shouldn’t TPS be keeping track, as Transport Canada does?

Will TPS be accused of “blaming the victim” if they posted such information? MADD has no qualms about calling out impaired driving when booze or weed contributes to a motor vehicle fatality.

Seems political to keep such details quiet, in fact. What are folks hiding?

Ninth: Enforce law prohibiting headphones / Airpods while driving / biking

You may have noticed in my videos a series of cyclists and e-Bike users wearing Airpods and even “over the ear” headphones. How could they possibly hear a car coming up behind them if they’re ignoring the law prohibiting such use?

Drivers are equally in the wrong here, and a little bell on a kid’s bike is of no use if the individual is wearing Airpods while behind the wheel.

Tenth: Mandatory helmets for cyclists?

Is there a relationship between outcomes and the fact that 63% of Ontario cyclists who died between 2010 and 2014 weren’t wearing a helmet? Recognizing there are Australian and New Zealand studies that found mandatory helmet laws reduced bike usage, but are we pushing for usage, or safety?

Feels like low-hanging fruit, assuming helmets actually prevent serious injuries. But isn’t that why we require motorcycles to wear them?

TPS might not need this tool to charge the Father who has his helmetless six year old son sit between his legs on the headtube of his moped each morning as they ride to school (you’ll see them as they pass the corner of Yonge St. and Church St.). There’s no way to legislate against stupidity, and one always has to wonder if that’s a key part of many traffic fatalities.

Eleventh: Do away with the dangerous 8 pace pedestrian head start

There’s nothing more counterintuitive than giving pedestrians an eight pace head start — supposedly in the name of safety — by delaying what was once a green light for both cars and pedestrians. Game it through when you’re next out for a walk.

If a car is going to run the cross-intersection red right and you start me out on foot early, before the vehicle traffic can join me in crossing what was once our joint green light, that red light runner will run me over as he/she passes through the intersection.

If the car that was patiently waiting beside me starts crossing the intersection at the same time as I enter the “pedestrian lane,” there a good chance that i) the red light runner will see that large object (the car beside me) and stop quickly so as to avoid an accident, or ii) the red light runner will hit the car (whose occupant is protected by steel and air bags) instead of me.

All that Toronto City Hall did by making this change a couple of years ago was to reduce the number of cars that can travel though the intersection during any given hour, while simultaneously increasing my risk as a pedestrian. Talk about lose-lose. As insane as any of the “traffic calming” changes that have been concocted since Vision Zero was launched in 2016.

Post Script

Apologies for the length; more than I should’ve covered in a single outing, perhaps. It may be too late for those who want to stop Premier Ford’s efforts to remove the hardened bike lanes from Yonge and Bloor Streets, but as you can see from the above array of conscious choices made by City Council and its appointees to the Toronto Police Service Board, there’s little tangible evidence that City Hall (or staff) was interested in savings all lives. It’s now clear that they’ve spend the last 15 years catering to a passionate, if narrow, political constituency.

In keeping with the finale in last Wednesday’s Star column: “Whatever your politics, the time has come to start calling out this B.S.”

MRM

(note: this post, like all blogs, is an Opinion Piece)