Cycle advocates want bike lanes from Lake to Steeles

Dennis Hanagan —

Cycling advocates want bike lanes on Yonge St. from Lake Ontario to Steeles Avenue.

“Those of us in bicycle advocacy believe if you build it they will come,” says Burns Wattie with Cycle Toronto.

An October public workshop discussed how Yonge might accommodate bike lanes. “It was a very preliminary discussion,” says Wattie. “We’re a mile away from presenting (the idea) to city council.”

To prepare for the workshop Wattie road his bike along Yonge from the lake to Steeles. He feels the space is there for bikes.

“There’s a tremendous dysfunctionality of the street for all its users, specifically in terms of cars,” says Wattie, referring to the street’s downtown section.

“What I noticed is no one uses the right lane. It’s used to park illegally. It’s not utilized in the way it was intended, as a through lane.”

Upper Jarvis resident and cyclist Genessa Radke suggests reducing Yonge’s downtown traffic lanes to two, widening sidewalks for the high pedestrian traffic, and using the left over space for bikes.

“It would increase the amount of people using Yonge Street safely with their bikes,” says the Cycle Toronto Ward 27 captain.

Wattie wants to get a Yonge Street cycle group together to pursue the lanes idea. There could be an opportunity to test them out next year if a plan goes ahead to close the Yonge subway between Eglinton and St. Clair for eight weeks of repairs.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity to work in collaboration with the city to suggest cycling alternatives. It opens up the whole possibility of having a field test for a dedicated cycling lane.”

He feels once cyclists hit St. Clair they’ll probably want to continue all the way downtown rather than park their bikes and get back on the subway.

A vast number of cyclists want physically-separated bike lanes to feel safe traveling alongside trucks and cars, says Wattie.

“There’s a cadre of cyclists, about one per cent, who are pretty happy to engage whatever traffic in whatever conditions. But there’s a huge number who will not cycle on arterials unless there’s a dedicated bike lane, like on Sherbourne,” he says.

That street, he says, “is the standard we need to get to in order to attract the rest of the 99 per cent.”

Radke says Yonge bike lanes would service many adjacent neighbourhoods and entice people to cycle to their downtown destinations rather than hop in a car.

It would help if the city had more people planning bike paths, she says. “It seems they only have enough people to work on one project at a time.”

Cycle Toronto is focusing on the downtown Yonge corridor to become a network of bike lanes, using roads such as Victoria, Bay, St. Luke Lane, Balmuto, and Gould — “all of those streets that cyclists use to go north and south in the vicinity of Yonge,” says Wattie.

There might just be a demand for it. “There’s a much higher percentage of people using their bikes downtown than anywhere else,” he says.