From the Toronto Globe and Mail:
If you are a cyclist and you are peeved at the lack of bicycle lanes, or the pesky way some of them stop and start again, who do you blame?Chances are, if you live in a downtown ward, your city councillor likes to have his or her picture taken in a bike helmet. The mayor does too.
Scarborough City Councillor Adrian Heaps, chairman of the city’s cycling committee, has worked to streamline the approvals needed to build bike lanes, stripping the ability to delay them from the mostly suburban councillors who tend to oppose them, in exchange for promising not to force lanes into their wards. He has promised 50 kilometres of new bike lanes this year. If they don’t materialize, I suppose you could blame him.
But it may be that we cyclists - and the activists who claim to represent us - should also share the blame, since Toronto has dragged its feet for so long, building only a fraction of the 500 kilometres of new bike lanes that were supposed to be finished by 2006, despite the proliferation of new riders and activist groups.
While it is tiring to read another column saying Toronto needs to be more like (insert major global city here), in this case, Toronto’s bike activists need to become more like New York’s.
Leave aside the recent YouTube clip of a New York cop bodychecking a cyclist during a Critical Mass pro-bike protest: The real message from the Big Apple is that bike activists need to go professional.
