With respect to Bloor West - While I may provoke a reaction by saying this (and to be clear, I'm not arguing against the Bloor bike lanes, although clearly most of my neighbours are) I think it's important to do a lessons learned and recognize just how far we are pushing the envelope with this change , and maybe we do need to regroup and do things differently next time.
There's always room for improvement, and broadly, I support the idea that there should more focus on infilling the network of cycle tracks adjacent to areas where critical mass ridership is being achieved and growing it out from there as oppose to isolated cycle tracks in areas with low ridership.
However, some of this work is tied to road resurfacing and reconstruction, opportunities that may only come along every 20 years or less, so in such cases it makes sense to take advantage of the opportunity when it arises rather than either defer the work for 20+ years or come back and dig up what we just did.
This is the argument for Kingston Road as part of Danforth-Kingston btw, that the road is getting a major resurfacing........so now's the time.
Respectfully, in the case of Bloor West I don't see that happening - ever. There certainly hasn't been any intervention that would enable lower vehicular volumes in a built form that remains autocentric. Densification is still in the future along Bloor and thru the central west end. Solutions that assume lower traffic volumes may be a bit wishful.
Ever seems like a long time, Paul.
Lets agree that radical change is difficult in this respect, but I think if you look at a similar areas, say Greektown in the east end, An area, I walk, transit to, and drive to with some frequency........
I can report that traffic volumes on Danforth do seem down a little bit, and that people are switching to bikes, in particular. I've counted at the Danforth/Pape intersection, EB in evening rush hour, and seen 9 cars queue by the time the light turned green, beside them six cyclists.
You would not have seen that 5 years ago, I'll guarantee. But its more complicated than just putting in a bike lane. Its the network of cycle tracks/bike lanes, its the prevalence of Bikeshare, its number of local supermarkets, its the frequency of local surface transit and so on.
I'll take up some specifics down below.
I would love to see traffic counts for Bloor West - I do suspect that the plan has underestimated just how much vehicular traffic has been choked, and how much travel times have changed. (I like how the traffic on Bloor has calmed, but the pure empirical impact on flow and throughput may be more than expected). Perhaps some simple refinements would make things better.....for instance Bloor and South Kingsway has suddenly become a gridlock zone, I wonder if changing the traffic light cycles would improve that. The point is, the pain points are real.
I don't doubt this, and have no problem with the idea of getting hard data.
Again respectfully, that's fair as a bit of logic, but one might ask - what possible greater linkage to transit could there be than putting bike lanes on a street that has a subway line running under it ?
You're right that on paper its a good candidate area, but above, I offered the example of Greektown, where I've seen significant modal shift the last few years. I highlighted a few things above, let's try to tie those into specifics.
a) Cycling Network: How do you go N-S as a cyclist near Bloor West? There are no full cycling facilities so far as I'm aware on Kipling, Islington, Jane, South Kingway or Keele and only limited bike lanes on Royal York and Runnymede. That's not ideal for luring people onto to bikes. Many of those roads feel quite unsafe for cycling now.
- Change: Parkside will get Cycle Tracks sooner than later, but at least one N-S corridor to the west needs to be added, if not two, in order to generate greater uptake.
b) Bikeshare: Much more established and dense in the Greektown area than in Bloor West Village ( 9 Bikeshare stations in close proximity/no hills), vs 5 in Bloor West.
c) TTC surface network support. Jane is somewhat comparable to Don Mills....... but bus service on Runnymede and S. Kingsway is not comparable to the service available on Broadview north or south
d) Local supermarkets. - under 1km from Bloor/Jane - 1; under 1km from Broadview/Danforth -- ~ 3 (technically the Foodland is 1.08km)
*****
What can be changed in the near-term (no major capital projects)
1) More Bikeshare
2) Parkside Cycle Tracks
3) An additional supermarket in Bloor West Village (one is probably coming just west of Jane)
4) Restore subway service to pre-pandemic levels
5)The connection from Dundas West to Bloor GO.
Medium/Long Term
1) GO Milton corridor with more frequent/off-peak service
2) Better N-S service on multiple TTC routes, starting w/S. Kingsway and Runnymede going from 15M off-peak to 10M off peak (and in Runnymede's case to 10M peak)
3) Add-on N-S cycle tracks and/or multi-use paths in more locations
4) More supermarkets one net new on Bloor west of Old Mill, one on Annette, somewhere in the area.
One more time, to be clear, I'm not griping about the bike lanes, I support them.
LOL, I think I got that bit.....
But we really are creating backlash out here. I would resist the urge to be defensive or dogmatic about that, maybe we need to step back and ask what can be done differently, and be a bit harder on ourselves.
- Paul
I agree. One other thing I didn't mention above is measures to smooth traffic flow; by which I mean severely restricting left turns on or off of Bloor (or other similar roads) where no traffic light and ideally left-turn lane is provided.
Thiis is a material issue when you go down to one lane each way, one car wanting to make a left can back up traffic for 2-3 blocks.
That said, curtailing the freedom to go left as one sees fit may yet be another source of anger among locals.
