Cycling infrastructure (Separated bike lanes)

[amnesiajune]

King and Queen, because of parking, are only *two lanes each*! That's exactly the problem...parking.

During rush hour - in other words, when capacity is actually needed - it's a no stopping area so those roads have four lanes each.

 

[steveintoronto]

Toronto might kill rush hour parking on streetcar routes
Posted by Amy Grief / September 30, 2015

84 Comments

Just like a Line 1 subway car, many of Toronto's downtown streets are jam-packed with commuters during rush hour. That's why at today's council meeting the city is looking at introducing even more parking restrictions on heavily trafficked streetcar routes along College/Carlton, Dundas and Queen between Roncesvalles and Parliament.

According to the Toronto Star, the head of Toronto transportation services Steve Buckley knows that rush hour is no longer just a two hour period at each end of the workday. Some streetcar routes operate at slower rates just before and after a typical rush hour (7 a.m. - 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. - 6 p.m.).

If approved, the restrictions will make certain on-street parking spaces off limits for an extra 30 to 90 minutes. The city already implemented similar restrictions on King Street, although as the Star notes, it's unclear whether this has actually helped speed up the 504 route.

http://www.blogto.com/city/2015/09/toronto_might_kill_rush_hour_parking_on_streetcar_routes/

 

[amnesiajune]

Your link says that it was already a no-stopping zone from 7 am - 9 am and 4 pm - 6 pm at the time the article was published. Since then the no-stopping rule has been expanded on King and Queen - now it's 7 am - 10 am and 3 pm - 7 pm on King and on Queen between Bathurst & Jarvis (the rest of Queen has no stopping in the AM inbound/PM outbound lanes)

 

[PinkLucy]

And at 3 pm sharp, on Queen St. at least, the tow trucks come out and remove the offenders. Makes me smile every time.

 

[Zach6668]

And at 3 pm sharp, on Queen St. at least, the tow trucks come out and remove the offenders. Makes me smile every time.

4:01 pm, every day, parking enforcement is out ticketing on St. Clair, west of Yonge.

 

[Admiral Beez]

http://www.blogto.com/city/2015/09/toronto_might_kill_rush_hour_parking_on_streetcar_routes/

Umm, that's from Sept 2015.

 

[steveintoronto]

Umm, that's from Sept 2015.

Just checking Google again, not much if any shows beyond that date. It's kind of curious, because it's difficult to know what the latest status is on parking, and if King or Queen will ever be fully no parking.

Did find this, and in light of Tory's litany of un-keepable promises, this is just more of same:

Smoother traffic is only the beginning: John Tory’s parking crackdown will change the way Toronto works

By Philip Preville | January 13, 2015 AT 3:26 pm

Attention Toronto drivers: your heaping helping of schadenfreude is ready. For all the times you’ve ever been stuck behind an illegally parked vehicle, asking aloud why doesn’t someone fine that jerk and tow him away?, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for: the moment when misfortune befalls them all, all at once, for the benefit of your drive home.

Mayor John Tory’s tag-and-tow offensive against illegally parked cars in the downtown core is now into its second week, ticketing and impounding any vehicle that parks illegally and blocks traffic during peak hours. The first week was a social media delight, as dozens of people, notably including Toronto Police Constable Clint Stibbe, snapped and posted photos of the towaways, many of them delivery trucks. Stibbe’s Twitter feed in particular—@TrafficServices—was a rousing perp parade of company logos winched to the boom, including FedEx, Coca-Cola, Canada Post, Canadian Linen and Uniform Service, and every shredding service under the sun: Iron Mountain, Recall Document Solutions, and AMJ Shredding. The traffic sting has ensnared a surprisingly broad variety of businesses, including Joe Warmington favourite Drain City, whose work consists of sucking up and hauling away used deep-fryer grease from downtown restaurants.

Some media outlets have been calling the mayor’s initiative a “blitz,” but Tory doesn’t want anyone to think this is a temporary measure that will disappear as quickly as it arrived. “The new normal” is how the mayor’s staff likes to describe the situation, and it’s about more than traffic. It’s a long overdue shift in the city’s metabolism, and so far Tory and his staff seem to be the only ones who’ve grasped just how far-reaching it will prove to be. [...]

http://torontolife.com/city/traffic...king-crackdown-will-change-way-toronto-works/

Well, as a cyclist (just came back from downtown via College/Dundas) the bike lanes are still blocked by stopped drivers and delivery vehicles, and Queen and King are far from free flowing during rush hour to cycle, albeit I avoid them if I can.

Still searching for a more recent update on this, will post when found.

Btw: Meant to reply to a comment of yours, can't remember if it was in this forum, some weeks back about cycling on Sherbourne, and how you found it (gist) 'preferable'. I agree, and yet it's far from perfect, but I fee far safer doing Sherbourne than most any other major road cycle lane in TO.

I think it's the curb produced by the elevated section, psychologically it's a more solid barrier. Any comments?

 

[steveintoronto]

Still digging to find a recent update on how the unclogging of King and Queen is coming along. Nothing showing since well over a year ago, but this did:

By Bob Ramsay TorStar
Tues., Sept. 13, 2016

If you own a bike, and more than half of Torontonians do, you may have more routes to ride it on this summer, but no place to park it. Especially downtown where finding a spot to lock your bike is as fun as finding a place to park your car.

A 2013 survey revealed that 7 per cent of Torontonians cycle daily. In the three years since then, it feels like the number of bikes on our downtown streets has exploded. In fact, today there are as many bikes as cars on College St. during afternoon rush hour.

But while 1.5 million of us ride a bike, the number of ring-and-post, outdoor bike racks stands at 17,000. This is up by less than 1,000 since 2006.

The obvious answer is to install more bike racks. The better answer is to install better-looking ones. But both are proving a challenge.

First, how can we get more bike racks?

That’s the job of City Hall, of course, but only on city streets and on city-owned property. But apartment, condo and office developers can also install bike racks for their tenants and unit owners. The number and location of these racks is determined largely by a set of parking guidelines. The problem is, the guidelines are still only in draft form, even though they were published in 2008 and haven’t been touched since.

The city divides bike parking into short-term (a few minutes up to a couple of hours) and long-term (several hours or overnight). But whether it’s providing racks for 30 bikes at the Pape Subway station, or secure racks for 120 bikes at Union Station, with plans for 220 racks (plus lockers and showers by the end of this year), Toronto has far less bike rack infrastructure than smaller cities, such as Montreal, or Chicago.

Other agencies can help. Business Improvement Associations (BIAs), for example, can direct some of their members’ funds to install more bike racks. In fact, the Financial District BIA won a Bicycle Friendly Business Award last year for leading the call for more bike racks on Bay St.

The city also supports bicycle user groups. They either want to bike together or come together to lobby their employer, office, condo or local Business Improvement Association for more bike racks. But like many other self-organizing groups with no real power base, they can’t do much.

So maybe it’s time for Toronto’s growing bike lobby to persuade city council to install more bike racks as well as more bike lanes. We can’t fully integrate bicycling into our city if recreational bicycling is easy but commuting-by-bike remains difficult.

We also can’t use bikes as transport if we don’t know where the empty bike racks are. The newly enlarged Bike Share Toronto has an App that not only shows how many drop-off ports are available at every one of its now 200 stations, it points you to the nearest ones. Meanwhile, in New York, its Department of Transportation has created a Google Map that shows the location of virtually every outdoor bike parking rack in all five boroughs.

But I’m also convinced one reason we don’t have more bike racks is that they’re so ugly. If we stopped viewing bike racks as bland street furniture and saw them instead as opportunities for functional creativity, beautiful bike racks would sprout up everywhere.

Local designer Phil Sazaren, has turned bike racks into works of art in Chinatown, Kensington, along Queen St. W. and outside the ROM. The Harbord St. restaurant, Terrazza, created bike racks that look like … bikes, and Mount Pleasant Cemetery sponsored a competition among Ryerson design students to come up with beautiful bike racks for its bucolic grounds.

Again, New York is ahead of us, but doesn’t have to be if we only start thinking of bike racks as opportunities to create works of art.

That same Department of Transportation commissioned musician-artist David Byrne to create a series of nine different bike racks, each reflecting an iconic part of the city (Chelsea, Times Square, Wall St.) or an activity (coffee cup) or subset of its population (The Ladies’ Mile, the hipster).

Is there any reason we can’t build more (and more beautiful) bike racks in Toronto? All it takes is a change in perspective.

We have the need. We have the money. We have the creative talent.

All we need now is the will.


Bob Ramsay is a Toronto communications consultant and founder of the RamsayTalks.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/09/13/bike-parking-falling-far-short-of-demand.html

 

[ADRM]

Still digging to find a recent update on how the unclogging of King and Queen is coming along. Nothing showing since well over a year ago, but this did:

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/09/13/bike-parking-falling-far-short-of-demand.html

It's pretty astonishing the degree to which bike parking is over capacity around the Ossington-College-Dundas-Queen W-Trinity Bellwoods area. Typically have to walk at least a block in either direction of your destination to find an unused bike ring on a weekend day.

 

[steveintoronto]

It's pretty astonishing the degree to which bike parking is over capacity around the Ossington-College-Dundas-Queen W-Trinity Bellwoods area. Typically have to walk at least a block in either direction of your destination to find an unused bike ring on a weekend day.

Yeah, I noticed that yesterday doing business along College. I still prefer the rings to the corrals though, it's a psychological difference more than absolute security.

 

[ADRM]

Yeah, I noticed that yesterday doing business along College. I still prefer the rings to the corrals though, it's a psychological difference more than absolute security.

Same, though I'll take whatever we can get quickest at this point. My councillor has been unresponsive to inquiries in this regard.

 

[steveintoronto]

it's a psychological difference more than absolute security.

Same, though I'll take whatever we can get quickest at this point. My councillor has been unresponsive to inquiries in this regard.

The obvious just struck me: It's *sightline*, if I can't check my machine at 30 second intervals through a window, or sit in a restaurant at the front looking out, I won't leave the machine, no matter what lock is on it. Even the saddle alone is a thirty year old Brooks Swallow. In the corrals, the sightline is blurred, if there's one at all.

 

[UserNameToronto]

Yeah, I noticed that yesterday doing business along College. I still prefer the rings to the corrals though, it's a psychological difference more than absolute security.

Depends. One thing I like about corrals is that any would-be thief has lots of choice. I have a deeply unappealing beater bike, and a Kryptonite lock that's worth more than the bike itself. Someone with the best bike in the corral might feel differently.

 

[steveintoronto]

Depends. One thing I like about corrals is that any would-be thief has lots of choice. I have a deeply unappealing beater bike, and a Kryptonite lock that's worth more than the bike itself. Someone with the best bike in the corral might feel differently.

But that same choice is offered at rings too. As mentioned in a later post, the advantage with rings is in being able to view your machine from a vantage point like a close-by window. I never lock my bike, let alone leave it, out of visual range.

 

[ottbike]

Sharrows have been painted on Adelaide between Shaw and Strachan.

Despite the mixed reviews on the use of sharrows, the City is putting a solid effort into making this section of Adelaide a "quite street route", especially with the recent cut-through at the west end of CAMH at Sudbury.