Toronto City Hall doesn’t rank very high when it comes to installing bike lanes, but you can’t help but be impressed by the ingenuity of excuses for inaction. Instead of bike lanes we often get statements such as “roads were built for cars” (false), “motorists are key to the success of local merchants” (false), or, more recently, “bike lanes cause climate change” (funny). One of the more difficult arguments for cyclists to counter is the necessity of bike lanes given the drop in cycling numbers during the winter. Now, even this excuse is being challenged by routine observation and data—especially where bike lanes have been installed. Based on our counts over the last two weeks (January 16–27, 2017), the Bloor bike lane was used for an average of 1,700 bike trips per day, rivalling even the summertime ridership for some bike lanes in the city.
The gist of the no-one-cycles-in-the-winter argument is that bike lanes are an inefficient use of public space. Since the argument is typically made by the auto lobby, the rationale should be dismissed with a hearty chuckle. After all, the car is a space monster virtually without equal, gobbling up massive amounts of land even when it sits idle. There are, for example, at least four parking spaces (measuring up to 330 square feet or 12.1 square metres) for every car—three of the spots are obviously empty at any given time. But as every cyclist knows, the prerequisites for auto infrastructure are far less stringent than those for cycling, which is why we were motivated to do our wintertime bike count. Our counts took place during rush hour (8–9 a.m.) on the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of each of the past two weeks. As with our count this past summer, even we were impressed by the results.
Toronto Public Health is hosting a series of public consultations this week to gather community input on the Toronto Overdose Action Plan, a set of recommendations for actions to mitigate the rising opioid overdose crisis.
The consultations—held in downtown Toronto, North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke—gives people a chance to offer feedback on the current draft of the Action Plan, which already includes nine specific recommendations. They include making drug-testing programs available for people to test illicit drugs for the presence of unexpected contaminants such as fentanyl, eliminating barriers to calling 911 for medical assistance during an overdose, and addressing social factors that can lead to overdose.
Mayor John Tory and city councillors Joe Cressy (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina), and Joe Mihevc (Ward 21, St. Paul’s West) spoke at the opening downtown Toronto consultation meeting at the Metro Central YMCA on Monday. Last summer, Toronto City Council approved three supervised injection sites in Toronto, and in January, the Province agreed to fund the harm-reduction sites.
In December of 1974, Private Teruo Nakamura, a private in the Japanese army, was captured on the South Pacific island where he had been hiding out since the Second World War. His captors had to explain to him that his country had surrendered 29 years earlier.
First, the good news: apart from any other members of Private Nakamra’s lost regiment and a few other hermits out there, it seems to be a matter of common understanding throughout the known universe that the most pressing infrastructure needed in Toronto today falls somehow into a category called “transit.”
Not so long ago, the question “If Toronto had an extra dollar to spend on new infrastructure, how should it be spent?” would produce a wide range of answers. Today, the answer would probably be “transit” 10 times out of 10.
Which is a good thing, because it is the right answer.
Unfortunately, the good news begins to run out from that point on.
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Photoist: Soran Bushi