Drivers, voters welcome Ford’s bike lanes talk
Traffic drove me out of Toronto; bike lanes keep me out
An editor with whom I once worked hit a pedestrian at an intersection many years ago, and the anguish in her voice when she told me the story has never left my memory.
“He was a runner, dressed all in black at night,” she recounted one day. “I was turning right at a traffic light where I had turned a thousand times before….he came from nowhere, and I hit him. I was not moving very fast, but still I did not see him.
“He survived, thank God, but he hired a lawyer to sue me. I was in court for years, and my entire life was put on hold while this case dragged on. It was a nightmare, an unending nightmare,” she said, her voice cracking.
Her cautionary tale probably increased the fear I experience when driving around pedestrians and cyclists. The last time I drove across Wellesley to Bay Street for a meeting at Queen’s Park, I realized I was clutching the steering wheel with sweaty palms and white knuckles.
It wasn’t the vehicular traffic that terrified me; it was anxiety at the thought of hitting a cyclist.
I sold my East York home and moved to Durham in 2014 when it became evident that the chaos caused by the Eglinton LRT was going to last for years. My visits to Toronto became blissfully fewer and farther between, until COVID ended them almost completely. Any day that I can avoid driving on a Toronto street with bike lanes is a good day, I think.
Doug Ford, in his populist wisdom, has really touched a nerve in his recent campaign to eliminate some existing bike lanes, and insist upon provincial approval of future ones. A LOT of car-driving, tax-paying, centrist-voting Ontarians don’t like bike lanes and would be happy to have a reasonable conversation about how many of them we actually need.
“I had tears in my eyes, reading the news,” said Neil Shorey, Assistant General Manager at City Taxi in Toronto. “The idea that someone was using common sense while speaking about bike lanes….I had given up hope that it would ever happen in my lifetime.”
“We have seen a troubling number of Truck drivers hitting cyclists while turning right,” a Trucking industry safety trainer told RWN recently. “Two within a few months, three in a year. Clearly, something is not working.”
Clearly, something is not working. Clearly. It could be that drivers are not careful enough, or it could be that cyclists and pedestrians who do not drive automobiles are unaware of the blind spots and physical limitations drivers experience. For example, before my younger son got his driver’s license in his late 20s, he had no grasp of the concept of “right of way.” He never learned it, because he never drove.
“Cripes, Tom, you can’t just step out on a flashing green!” I exclaimed one day. “Cars are turning left. The flashing green is not for YOU!”
Once, I saw a young woman dash to the curb of Adelaide Street and glance to her right, looking for oncoming traffic. Seeing none, she stepped off the curb, right in front of a car barrelling at her from the west driving east, because Adelaide is one way going east. Clearly, the young woman did not realize traffic on a one-way street is the opposite of what you would expect. Thankfully, she jumped backward in time to miss becoming a statistic.
Hoping to discuss the relative safety or danger of bike lanes; or the usefulness of bike lanes in any and every arbitrary location as opposed to in some specific locations; or whether some bike lanes are a complete waste of space and time; or whether cyclists should have to earn a Ontario drivers’ license in order to share the roads with the trucks and cars capable of accidentally killing them seems like a conversation intelligent adults would be keen to have.
Unfortunately, for the last many years, a fulsome conversation around bike lanes is as unpopular as the discussion of whether fully Electric Vehicles are better for society than hybrids. Daring to imply there is still even a helpful exchange of ideas to be had brands you a cretin, an ignoramus eager to spew carbon and rape the Earth.
Into this fray, steps Doug Ford with the insistence we actually need to address the details of successful bike lane planning in a discussion.
“Why do we have bike lanes on University Avenue, hospital row?” Ford wonders why these lanes were not assigned to secondary roads, not ambulance thoroughfares.
“Ripping up our roads will make people less safe, make traffic worse, and put lives at risk. Full stop. I challenge the Premier to talk to people who have lost loved ones on our roads and hear their stories,” Mayor Olivia Chow tweeted on October 24th.
“It might be hard for the province to do two things at once but, as leaders we have to —tackle congestion AND keep people safe at the same time!”
I’m afraid Olivia Chow underestimates how much drivers and voters and taxpayers hate the bike lanes, and overestimates how much power municipalities have over provincial politicians.
Clearly, it’s time to talk like adults – for everyone’s sake.
