Twenty years ago, it was bad out there in Toronto for cyclists. There was blood on the streets. At the time I was a columnist in the local news pages at the National Post. The paper has a conservative bias; even so the Post published a lot of stories from me about cyclist carnage and the need to improve bike infrastructure in Toronto.
In 2006 I reported this in the Post:
“On Thursday, April 20, a little after 8 a.m., Dr. Hubert Van Tol, a father of three, left his modern home in a leafy, sidewalk-free enclave in Lawrence Park, and headed to his job as head of the molecular neurobiology and transgenic section at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Half an hour later, a dump truck filled with gravel heading south on Avenue Road turned right on Cortleigh Boulevard, hit him and crushed his head.
“Dr. Van Tol, 46, was no self-righteous freak. He was merely doing something that is commonplace in his native Holland: riding his bike to work.”
That same day, a tractor-trailer killed a 16-year-old girl riding a bike at the corner of Finch Ave. W. and Keele Street.
I thought about that the other day. A group of guys, now mostly balding or turning grey, have a ritual of gathering on Tuesdays at 5 p.m. at Bickford Brewery, a little watering hole on Harbord Street, just a bit east of Bickford Park, which is popular with Toronto dog owners. It’s summertime; the brewery has a thin patio out front with a few tables and umbrellas, which is quite a pleasant place to gather and shoot the breeze, as it were. But for me the most pleasant part is the bike lane that passes in front.
Most of our gang shows up by bike.
Harbord, back in the day, had a bike lane, painted on the street, but incomplete; it died at certain points along the route from Ossington Avenue to the University of Toronto. We rode that bike lane a lot when our kids were little; our kids on their bikes and their parents on ours, as we headed in the morning to U of T kids’ summer camps in the morning. There were other families and commuters on the bike lanes; even still it always felt a little dangerous and precarious.
A couple of years ago the city began a push to rethink the bike lanes on Harbord. It was a big, invasive and complex effort, and one could not ride a bike on Harbord for two years. The result is worth the wait. As we sit the world zips silently by in front of us. Professionals riding home from work. Students leaving the university. Whole families, on those big Dutch bikes with ample seating for children on the back. Everyone, from seniors to children, is on the bike lane. It’s fast, safe, silent and good for Planet Earth.
It happens that three of the guys who gather at the brewery were active, back when I was a journalist, in a group called Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists. We all knew then, and proclaimed at high volume, that Toronto needed to do something urgent to catch up with major cities worldwide, to improve the conditions for bicycle riders. They (and I sometimes joined in) held silent ghost bike rides for cyclists killed in traffic. At the end of one such ride, one of the men—now on the patio with me—told the crowd of cyclists, “My name is Rick,” while holding his baby boy in his arm. “We gather one week after every cyclist’s death so that we can remember them. It’s not something we like to do but we feel it is important to memorialize those of us who die on our streets.”
What a difference a couple of decades makes. These days Bikeshare Toronto has blanketed the city with thousands of bikes that one can rent for a few dollars a ride; there are glorious, physically separated bike lanes on Bloor Street; University Avenue; Harbord; Richmond; Adelaide; Sherbourne and lots of other places. Former mayor Rob Ford, of all people, started the push for bike lanes, mayors John Tory and Olivia Chow have continued the expansion of the bike network, which goes to show that cycling safety is not a left-right issue but just good city planning that is popular with the electorate.
And so I think it’s a good time for me and my buddies to raise a glass. We are all drowning in bad news these days, so it is doubly nice to have something to celebrate: we fought for safe biking conditions in our town, and we won.