Glenn De Baeremaeker explains at Council that bike lanes always make a difference, even on the "300 metre section" of Birchmount that has them.

What if I told you that you could kill a man — or a woman or a child — for the low cost of $110? No jail time. No criminal record. No other fines or fees. Quite a bargain, huh? And you may not even have to pay that much, if you successfully challenge the penalty in court. The offer is not gonna get any sweeter than this. I dare you, find a better deal.  Kill a person, pay $110, move on with your life.

How, you might ask?  Well, it's obvious.  Just pick someone whom society willfully neglects, whose life is considered unimportant and whose death is no big whoop, an unfortunate but forgettable consequence of modern society.  A little collateral damage at the margins.  Nope, not homeless people.  They're looking down on that now.

I'm talking about cyclists. Just open the door of your parked car into an oncoming cyclist and smack 'em into traffic. It might take several tries before you actually kill one, but keep at it. The police will be hesitant to charge you at first. And then other cyclists will get all uppity, and police will compromise with a $110 fine. Because that's how much a cyclist's life is worth.

Incidentally, it's also how much a cyclist is fined for not coming to a complete halt at a stop sign. Or not having a bell. Or having a defective bell. Or riding in or along a pedestrian crossing. [PDF]

A $5 bell is worth the same as the life of the person who buys it. Remember that.

I pointed this out to my dad. $110 to kill a person. He suggested that 007 should dispatch an enemy in this manner in the next Bond film, a different kind of license to kill. I had to break it to him that Hot Fuzz already did as much. (Although Edgar Wright, the director and co-writer of Hot Fuzz, is indeed setting his next movie in Toronto.)

This should make people angry. That goes without saying. No, maybe, it doesn't. Certain people get angry, sure.  But not the right ones, the ones who are in a position to directly effect policy change.  Some of them get mildly riled.  And sometimes that's enough, and sometimes it's not.

 

The condescension, contempt, and indifference with with cyclists, their lives, and their safety, are addressed on an institutional level is appalling.  Yes, virtually every politician makes a bit of pro-cyclist posturing. Even Rob Ford prefaced his it's-their-own-fault-for-being-on-the-road statement by saying that his "heart bleeds when someone gets killed." His views are likely shared by a considerable chunk of politicians, and, if not, they may as well be, for all the concern they have over cycling infrastructure. You can only blame the stalled Bike Plan on Case Ootes and Doug Holyday for so long before people start finally asking why is Council anti-cycling and anti-cyclist? Why can they not paint lines on the road?

Take a look at the official Cycling Map (if you can stomach the terrible web design and massive PDFs).  Try to plot a route from anywhere to anywhere using bike lanes. Fragmentary, ineffective, piecemeal. It's not a network so much as a visual plot of photo ops past.

Community Councils used to be in charge of approving bike lanes. Which essentially meant the decisions to install bike lanes were entirely in the hands of the councillors for particular wards. (A ward councillor virtually always gets his or her way at community council.)

Then someone realized this was not a good way to build a bike network, and the policy was changed to route all approvals through the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee.

"Bike lane plan hits bump on road to 50 kms," proclaimed the Star after the committee's most recent meeting, "chaired by Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker (Ward 38 Scarborough Centre), an avid cyclist. Among the items deferred yesterday was 3.1 kilometres of bike lane on Brimorton Dr. in his own ward because it would affect parking for 200 households."

A couple weeks earlier I had written of De Baeremaeker that he "is famous for commuting by bike between his ward and City Hall nearly every weekday of the year, and while that's certainly a heroic and impressive feat, it's reduced to a novelty or perhaps even a gimmick by the fact that it doesn't translate into meaningful policy..." The day a compacted version of that article appeared in the paper, Glenn and I ran into each other at the Varsity theatre, between screenings at TIFF.  

I like Glenn. He's always chipper and enthusiastic, and there's never any doubt that he really likes being a councillor. He acts the way Pam McConnell dresses. We had a good chat. He told me about a cross-Scarborough bike lane he's planning and how all these new lanes were going to Works the following Monday. This was very good to hear.

So my reaction to the Star article reporting on the meeting consisted mostly of me repeating to myself in disbelief, Oh man. Oh man. Perhaps it was naive of me to be disappointed in a politician for behaving like a politician. The scorpion and the frog and all that.

The original staff report recommending the bike lanes [PDF] stated pretty clearly that "The existing parking demand on Brimorton Drive can be accommodated in the reduced number of parking spaces." Staff are known to be wrong every so often, but I'm inclined to trust the Senior Engineer, Pedestrian and Cycling Infrastructure, over people who are worried that bike lanes will "affect parking." The report also said that "The Ward Councillor has been consulted and supports the proposed installation of bicycle lanes on Brimorton Drive, as described in this report."

So I called Glenn to ask what the deal was. The bottom line, it seems, is that the Star mischaracterized the committee's decisions [PDF]. The committee didn't ask for a "deferral" of consideration of the lanes on Brimorton, which under Council procedures would mean putting off the item to a subsequent meeting of the same committee.  Rather, De Baeremaeker amended the staff recommendation to add the words "in principle," so that the committee recommended that "City Council approve, in principle, the installation of bicycle lanes on both sides of Brimorton Drive, from Brimley Road to Scarborough Golf Club Road..." He did this so that the recommendation could continue to go forward to the Sept. 24 Council meeting, alongside a report he requested on the possibility of creating "hybrid bike lanes, where feasible, that allow parking in non-rush hour periods along certain sections of Brimorton Drive."  Committee decisions have to be approved by Council, anyway, and so his adding of the words "in principle" didn't affect the timeline. Rather they were meant to essentially be a placeholder, pending the recommendation from Transportation Services regarding the hybrid lanes. 

When that report surfaced [PDF], it reaffirmed the earlier recommendation, saying that "there is no need to implement hybrid bicycle lanes from a parking demand perspective" and that "providing bicycle lanes at all times on both sides of the roadway and parking on one side only, adjacent to the bicycle lane, will result in a safer, more comfortable environment for cyclists."

But why did Glenn ask for that extra staff report in the first place? "There are 200 families that will lose parking," he told me. "Staff said the people who are losing parking can park across the street." So why can't they? "People who live on both sides of the road have parking ... Most people, when they have a parking spot in front of their house, they see that as how their family functions. It's been that way since they bought the house in 1950. To take parking away is an emotional issue for many people."

The thing is, these spots are in addition to front-yard parking.  These are spots for visitors.  Visitors who will have to cross the street, something Glenn was hesitant to ask them to do, as it's "essentially a four-lane road right now" and not everyone is able-bodied enough to be able to navigate that. Also, he can't tell people to jaywalk, because that's "illegal." "That's a grey area," I said. "I'm the chair of the Works committee, and I know the bylaws," he responded.  I'm sorry, Glenn, but in this particular case, I'm not sure you do.

But that's beside the point, as he did the right thing and stood up to his constituents, defending the city-wide implications of building a bicycle network. Based on the original Star article, I was preparing to write something demanding he have the courage to do just that, but from my conversation with him, it seemed he already had. "The people I'm talking to out there have said to me, 'you're building these lanes for who, for some mythical people who ride bikes along Brimorton?'"

He says he explained to them that there are so few suburban cyclists precisely because that sort of infrastructure doesn't yet exist. The build it and they will come approach. "It might inconvenience you to park across the street," but "it is for the collective good of the community."

"Without a doubt, I [will] lose votes over this."

Now what about staff's assertion that he had already given his blessing to the original proposal? "I signed off on bike lanes on Brimorton," but "those [specific] recommendations were written without me seeing them."

And what about the other lanes put in limbo at the works meeting? From the same Star article: "Also deferred: 3 kilometres on Horner Ave. in Etobicoke, where Councillor Mark Grimes (Ward 6 Etobicoke-Lakeshore) warned of a safety issue due to truck traffic."

As Grimes is also a member of the works committee, it sure seemed as though the problem of councillors delaying lanes in their own wards didn't disappear when bike lane approvals were shifted from community councils to Works. But Glenn insists it did "absolutely" make a difference and that the Horner lanes were a particular exception. "To my knowledge, Councillor Grimes had supported every bike lane we've put into his ward so far." With this one, though, there was a particular concern about safety due to it being a trucking route.  Quoting Grimes, he told me, "'I've been in the trucking business, I know the turning radii of the trucks, it's too dangerous, I know somebody is going to get killed.'"

"If I felt insincerity, I wouldn't have supported [Grime's motion]."

At Council, things happened as De Baeremaeker told me they would, with everything — including the Brimorton lanes — going through without a hitch [PDF].  Not that there wasn't an extensive debate. The progressive-ish half of Council was tripping over themselves to voice support.

"This is a very large city, and quite frankly the automobile and trucks have taken over our road space and basically eliminated any real safe bicycle riding space for cyclists," said Anthony Perruzza (Ward 8 York West). "We treat cyclists as a second-class category, or as a second-class mode of transportation, and I think that that's absolutely wrong. We basically now are giving all of our road space to the automobile. We wouldn't treat pedestrians like we treat cyclists. We give pedestrians the ability to walk and move around in generally very safe conditions along sidewalks and so on. We don't do that with cyclists. We try to find ways of squeezing them in in some cases, but we often squeeze them in a way that is absolutely not safe to do so. We squeeze them in, for example, then we park cars to their right, and we squeeze them in between parked cars and a high-volume lane...

"It's about showing people how important the bicycle is as a mode of transportation and as a positive element to add into one's lifestyle."

Doug Holyday (Ward 3 Etobicoke Centre), the southern-lawyer-ish right-winger, had a tantrum that the City is building its bike network backwards, by putting lanes on the side streets and minor routes ahead of the major roads.  He's probably correct, but at this point we're grateful for whatever we can get, as soon as we can get it.

In response to Councillor Frances Nunziata's (Ward 11 York South-Weston) par-for-the-course bewilderment over whether there is a "plan" guiding the development of bike lanes, Shelley Carroll (Ward 33 Don Valley East) said, "There is a plan. And it's all the cycling community has been asking us for for a decade. It is all they've been asking for. They don't need a speech. They don't want to hear any of these speeches. They want the lanes. They just want us to do it."

So will we hit the modest 50 km goal this year after all?  It would be hugely symbolic for the city to meet the target for once. De Baeremaeker told me they'll be "close." Even if a lane is approved at Council, it won't get built right away, because the city has to put out a tender for the actual painting. Having to do this every time certainly slows things down, but the city is trying to move towards standard offer contracts so that they no longer have to hire construction companies on a lane-by-lane basis.

Maybe politicians are starting to get it?  Maybe they're starting to really care? Maybe the posturing is now that which is directed toward those who cherish their free parking? Maybe things are actually starting to change on a cultural and structural level?  

Glenn told me about how much of a difference a lane makes even for an experienced cyclist like himself, giving him the freedom to navigate around potholes and sewer grates and other hazards, in addition to acting as a buffer from motorized vehicles. "It's like Kramer would say, 'wide lanes, it's beautiful.'"

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