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Scrap the Rocket! Save a cyclist!
By Mike Strobel, Toronto Sun
Aha! Another reason to ditch those fat, waddling, traffic-busting streetcars:
They’re bad for cyclists.
A study of downtown bike crashes finds a third of the serious ones are caused by getting snarled in streetcar tracks.
This is outrageous. OUTRAGEOUS!
For once I am on the side of the bicycult, which, as every schoolboy knows, is the militant sect of Toronto cyclists.
Any minute now, expect bicycultists to mount the barricades on their Raleighs, demanding that streetcars, like damnable cars, be put in their place.
What right do those 80,000-pound hydro-sucking horrors have to hog King St. or Dundas St. or Kingston Rd.? God created roads for eco-friendly cyclists.
Two wheels good! Twelve wheels bad!
Turns out, it’s not just squealing metal, road-blocking malfunctions and Bombardier delivery snags, all good reasons to forget sentimentality and pull the plug on the Red Rocket.
Now, researchers at Ryerson and UBC have studied 276 bike crashes in downtown T.O. from May 2008 to November 2009 that required a hospital visit. In 87 cases, the bicycle’s tires got caught in or skidded on streetcar tracks.
(A more worrisome finding was that 12% of crashed bike riders had been drinking within the previous six hours, or about one in eight, but perhaps they were out celebrating the new Bloor St. bicycle lanes.)
Whatever. I bet a much higher percentage of streetcar riders have a snootful.
The report includes testimony from cyclists who ran afoul of Red Rocket tracks, of which there are a whopping 160 km, both ways.
“I had a green light so I proceeded,” reported one victim. “A cyclist turned right onto the bike path I came from. I swerved to avoid her and my wheel got caught ...”
Let’s congratulate him (or her) for obeying a green light — all too rare for a cyclist — and hope there was a speedy recovery.
I hesitate to point out the study found women riders far more likely to be involved in these accidents, nearly 60%. But I’m not going there. These days, you just can’t bar women from riding bicycles, even for safety reasons. We’re not Saudi Arabia.
The study’s authors, clearly bike fans, propose wider tires and more separated bicycle lanes to save riders from the ribbons of Red Rocket steel.
But why not get to the root? Dispense with the Rocket itself. Pull out the tracks and let bicycles — and cars — glide safely to and fro.
You may recall the sainted Rob Ford preached this in the 2010 mayoral campaign, though he had to back off because of the Bombardier contract, which is (slowly, painfully) replacing the streetcar fleet.
Ford took another run at it in 2014, after a City Hall report concluded that stopped streetcars were the biggest cause of gridlock on King St.
“I’ve been saying it from Day 1,” Robbie said, “these streetcars are causing congestion.
“We have to start phasing them out. I know we just bought a lot of new ones, but we cannot be investing in above-ground transit anymore.”
Yes, “subways, subways, subways.” Back then, it was a key reason to dump the streetcar. Now, there’s a new cry:
Scrap the Rocket! Save a cyclist!
