“It is still a city where cars rule and dead walkers and cyclists are a cost of doing business,” writes Lloyd Alter for Treehugger. “The late Toronto Mayor Rob Ford once said about bikes and cyclists: ‘I can’t support bike lanes. Roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks. My heart bleeds when someone gets killed, but it’s their own fault at the end of the day.'”

“His replacement as Mayor is John Tory, who won the election after beating Rob’s thuggier brother Doug by being Rob Ford without the penchant for grabbing bums or smoking crack. But he never lost sight of where the votes are—the suburban drivers.”

“Up in the North part of the city, in the former North York that was amalgamated into Toronto to drown the downtown progressive vote with car-driving conservatives, Yonge Street is now what Charles Marohn of Strong Towns calls a Stroad, ‘a street/road hybrid and, besides being a very dangerous environment (yes, it is ridiculously dangerous to mix high speed highway geometric design with pedestrians, bikers and turning traffic), they are enormously expensive to build and, ultimately, financially unproductive.'”

“It’s dangerous up there: 78 collisions involving pedestrians, five cyclists, eight dead or seriously injured in recent years. The local city councillor describes it to Alex Bozikovic of the Globe and Mail:”

“North York Centre is one of the main urban hubs in the city, and it’s been completely neglected,” he said. “It’s a sea of high-rises with a six-lane road down the middle.” And, he added, the people who live there deserve better. “They deserve a main street with some atmosphere and some culture,” he said. “They deserve sidewalks wide enough to sit down for a glass of wine and lunch with a friend.”

“Bozikovic notes that Yonge Street is ‘deeply unpleasant because of the road design, which hasn’t been reconstructed since 1975. The sidewalks are narrow and raggedy, lined by a motley mix of retail and parking lots. Six wide lanes of car traffic are crammed during rush hour, roaring fast at other times.'”

“The city has come up with a plan to rebuild it as a safer street complete with bike lanes, wider sidewalks, spaces for restaurant patios. But to do it, the road would be reduced from six lanes to four. There is another plan to keep it at six lanes and move the bike lanes to the next street called Beecroft, which is a long way west. it is also well known that cyclists, like anyone else, prefer a direct route and circuitous distant routes don’t work very well. This plan also costs $20 million more because two streets are now being rebuilt. But Mayor John Tory doesn’t like the idea of removing two lanes, and wants to do the Beecroft Plan.”

Read the full story here