From the Globe:
A path that leads to nowhere
The new West Toronto Railpath may bring green to a rough patch of the city, but to cyclists, it's . . .
BERT ARCHER
Special to The Globe and Mail
This week, the city green-lighted a project for a bike path that's been in the works since 1997 -- funding, architect's drawings and all. You'd think cycling activists around the city would be pleased, what with Mayor Miller's poor record so far on adding bike lanes. "If anything," Councillor Adam Giambrone said at a public meeting to announce the project on Monday, "people will say it's more than overdue."
In fact, cycling activists are saying much more than that about the West Toronto Railpath. The planners are being criticized for confusing parkland with bike lanes, and cycling for pleasure with cycling as transportation.
"It doesn't make any sense at all," says David Meslin, a long-time urban activist and founder of the Toronto Public Space Committee. "There is only one path in the design, and it will be full of joggers, dogs, dog walkers, kids, seniors . . . . Riding a bike on this path will actually be dangerous, unless you're going really slow."
In landscape architect Scott Torrance's drawings, the vision for the 2.1 kilometres of railway track, which run parallel to Dundas Street West from Dupont almost to Lansdowne, looks as much like parkland as anything. Lovely parkland, with sculptures and wild grass and aspen trees -- and the occasional GO train. (GO will continue to use the tracks, which will be set apart from the public space.)
But it doesn't look much like an answer to the city's demands for a bike-transportation network. Not only would this multi-use path discourage cyclists from going anywhere near the speed they would on the streets, it also fails to connect directly to other paths or bike lanes.
Besides that, the path is only about a third of what the city had hoped to develop along the corridor. A further four kilometres of the railway land is still owned by CP Rail, which it leases to GO Transit, and both have plans for it -- GO to increase its service, and CP to possibly turn part of it into the Blue 22 air-rail link between Pearson Airport and Union Station.
"We'd very much like to extend this down south of Dundas so that it ultimately connects with the Martin Goodman Trail," says Mr. Giambrone, in whose ward the bike path will be constructed. "Ultimately, routes like this will allow people to get most of their way across the city in rail paths, hydro corridors and other off-the-street routes."
Though the new path is being touted by Mr. Giambrone and the city primarily as a cycling facility, Mr. Giambrone says of the current project that "an isolated section of bike path doesn't really do much unless you have the interconnectivity of a whole network.
"How useful will this be to individuals?" he says. "I'm sure some people will be able to use it, but its real use is as part of a bigger plan." CP and GO, he says, "may just not want to move for 10 years."
So, in the short term it will amount to a lovely piece of 10-metre-wide parkland. Nothing wrong with that, right? Not according to Nancy Smith Lea. The main force behind the establishment of the Harbord Street bike lanes, Ms. Smith Lea has since helped found Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists (ARC) and thinks that the rail path is essentially a wasted -- or at least misplaced -- effort.
"The rail path is a great initiative," she says, praising the space as parkland, "but it doesn't seem like a crucial thing at the moment. We need so many other things." First on her list is an east-west route to help cyclists get across the city. "The more the better," she allows of the current plan. "Anything is better than nothing. But calling it a bike facility? It's just not."
Indeed, the project's boosters -- its designer and the national urban nature advocacy group Evergreen among them -- tend to highlight its qualities as parkland and general recreational space. "It should be an interesting and delightful experience, whether you're taking your dog for a walk or commuting or out pushing your stroller around," says Mr. Torrance, whose three-year-old firm was also responsible for the Downsview Memorial Parkette at Keele and Wilson.
"I think it's an excellent project," says Stewart Chisholm, manager of Evergreen's Common Grounds program. "It brings new life to neighbourhoods, to Parkdale and the Junction."
In fact, it may be partly due to Evergreen's participation in the project -- they partnered with the Roncesvalles-Macdonell Residents' Association and the Community Bicycle Network in 2001 to push the project forward -- that the rail path was designed to be so multi-use. Evergreen's primary concern, according to Mr. Chisholm, is not cycle commuting but "bringing nature into cities."
All of which highlights an idiosyncrasy in the city's thinking about cycling, voiced in its extreme version by Councillor Rob Ford recently when he blamed cyclists for their own injuries and deaths on the streets of Toronto. There seems to be a great tendency, especially among car-driving councillors, to think of cycling as primarily a recreational activity instead of a viable urban mode of transportation.
"It would be a quicker ride now beside the tracks than it will be when it's finished," says Mr. Meslin.
"It's a good thing," he says, "but not a useful thing for cyclists. It will be really good to have a park that you can walk along, or bike along for a slow recreational ride. What's missing is a way to get from point A to point B on your bike, and they had an opportunity to do that here. I think there was enough room in the right-of-way to put a bike path and a pedestrian path side by side, but they chose to do a bunch of landscaping and sculptures and stuff."
AoD