﻿In a 2016 pilot project, Toronto put bike lanes on a 2.5 kilometre stretch of Bloor Street West
in the Annex and Koreatown. We lived in the neighbourhood at the time and the new lanes,
however modest, actually played a big role in us becoming more comfortable biking in cities.
We used them often to get around the neighbourhood, including to the
University of Toronto and Christie Pits Park, but being so short they were less
useful for reaching other neighbourhoods. This pilot project was the subject of a study,
which we’ve linked in the description, finding a dramatic improvement in perceptions of safe
cycling on the street, especially among cyclists themselves. Economic indicators improved after
the bike lanes, but that was also found for a comparison street that didn’t experience any
infrastructure changes, so it’s hard to know if the bike lanes had a positive effect, but there
also wasn’t an obvious negative effect. One interesting finding is that merchants were
a lot more likely than customers to arrive on the street by car, and that merchants also tended to
overestimate car use among customers. Almost half of merchants on Bloor arrived by car,
compared to just 1 in 10 customers. Most visitors actually just arrived by walking,
and among the different types of customers, those who arrived on foot were the most likely to spend
at least $100 a month on the street. The major weakness of these lanes, the
short length, was fixed in 2020 when the pandemic accelerated Toronto’s bike lane expansion plans,
including an extension of this pilot to a serious bike corridor covering Bloor Street in the west
and Danforth Avenue in the east. Normally bike infrastructure in Toronto is controversial,
there’s a lot of rhetoric about the so-called “war on cars”, but this time
it actually went fairly smoothly. Except for a suburban councilor who proposed scrapping
the project and offering more free parking instead, but some things never change.
As a long and direct bike corridor following 15km over a subway line,
it’s hard not to notice the similarity with Montreal’s new St-Denis express bike corridor
covering 11km over a metro line, which we now live near and which we praised a lot in a recent video.
As we talked about in that video, being able to follow a simple and straight route matters
a lot for the cycling experience. Indirect routes are a burden on people’s time and mental energy,
and they’re a subtle but easy way to discourage people from choosing to get around by bike.
On this point, the Bloor/Danforth Bikeway is actually a little more direct than its Montreal
counterpart because Bloor and Danforth are two ends to the same street, so the entire 15 km route
can be done without turning at all. Montreal’s St-Denis corridor is good for directness but
it’s not able to quite match that simplicity because you switch streets once or twice.
Where the Bloor/Danforth lanes fall behind is consistency. Separation from car traffic on much
of the corridor is top notch, as good as Montreal or better, especially when you’re separated from
traffic not by concrete or parked cars but both of those things together. In some places though
the separation leaves a lot to be desired, like the sections where you’re in a small lane
separated from fast moving traffic by nothing but paint or the flimsiest kind of bollards.
That’s not actually the worst part because we encountered a stretch underneath train
tracks by the Bloor GO Station that didn’t have bike lanes at all, even painted.
Underpasses like that are exactly the kind of potentially low visibility areas where
separation from car traffic is extra important. This Toronto corridor probably has more concrete
separation than Montreal’s St-Denis corridor on average, which deserves praise, but Montreal’s
development seems to be more strategic in its placement of concrete, focusing more on dangerous
places like intersections and underpasses. An underpass on St-Denis was actually the site of
a cyclist death in 2014 back when the street looked very different than it does today.
Comparing these two corridors for consistency and planning is a little unfair, because St-Denis is
based on a deliberate vision for an express bike network while Toronto’s Bloor/Danforth is more
of a patchwork because it was implemented more hastily for the pandemic. Some of it’s
even technically considered temporary. Still, these details are important to notice.
As for parking, most segments have car parking sensibly to the left of the bike lane, similar to
St-Denis in Montreal, but in the middle around Bay Street we noticed parking to the right of the bike
lane, which seems obviously worse in so many ways: drivers have to cross the bike lanes to park,
passing parked cars on the driver side means you’re more likely to get doored, and the parked
cars no longer act as a useful barrier to separate cyclists from moving cars. One good feature we
noticed in the better parts of the corridor was integration of bike parking into the separation
between bikes and cars. There were even some stations for Toronto’s bike share system.
Despite some issues, this new corridor is a substantial improvement to Toronto’s bike
network that we were really happy to see. Unfortunately when we were there it wasn’t
just cyclists who were excited to use this new space, we also saw drivers who thought the bike
lane was a drop-off zone or this pedestrian who was pretty confident that the bike lane was just
another extension of the sidewalk. On the bright side, on reviewing our footage after we got home
we realized that we passed CJ Hoyle, who has a Toronto-based cycling channel that we enjoy.
This Bloor/Danforth Bikeway isn’t the only big improvement to Toronto’s bike network since
we lived there just two years ago. Another key route we noticed was University Avenue,
which has completely new bike lanes connecting Bloor to downtown, although they don’t go quite
as far as Google Maps would have you believe. A recent study tried to measure the benefit
to Toronto’s bike network from all the improvements put in place for the pandemic.
Using a system of ranking routes according to suitability for cyclists, they analyzed Toronto’s
bike network before and after the pandemic. Based on the second lowest tier of stress,
so routes that should be suitable and comfortable for the majority of the adult population,
Toronto’s pandemic improvements increased the job, population, and food accessibility of its bike
network by 10 to 20%. Still, these benefits were concentrated in more central parts of the city,
with far less bicycle accessibility in Toronto’s suburban areas.
Let us know your experiences cycling on the Bloor/Danforth Bikeway.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to bike and subscribe.