What if I told you, soon-to-be-inspired reader, that there exists a city that in many ways is similar to Toronto, at least when it comes to cycling? What if I also told you that cycling is awesome in this other city?
Consider all the things that makes cycling undesirable for Torontonians. I'll sort these into some broad categories. There are things that can make it dangerous: traffic, bad roads, lack of bike lanes, construction. There are things that prevent it from being fun: pollution, weather, lack of showers in offices, asshole drivers that get angry when you exercise your rights as a citizen. There are things that make it lame: bikes from Canadian Tire that weigh more than the car they replace, bikes getting stolen, bikes getting broken.
All those things also exist in New York City. I was inspired to write about this post because we could so easily have the same culture that they have, but in Toronto. So what's the difference?
I cycled in Manhattan once, and it was amazing. Here was the key difference: you can actually get places on a bicycle in NYC. Even with traffic, theft, tricky roads and dangerous grates, pollution, and text-absorbed pedestrians, people cycle because you can actually get from one end to other faster than by most other means. In a day, I cycled around Central Park, down to Wall Street, around the south end of Manhattan (I'm not even going to pretend that I remember what all the neighbourhoods are called) to the Brooklyn Bridge, over to a famous pizzeria, back across another Huge Frickin Bridge, through SoHo, through Tribeca, and it goes on like this.
Toronto's problem is sprawl. Maybe that's not too revolutionary, but in my opinion this point gets muted by all the angst over bike lanes that don't connect to anything. We have a sprawl problem, not a problem with anything else. Motorists don't hate cyclists everywhere in the world: that's a cultural thing. In other places, cyclists contend with a lot more than the cracks we have in our pavements. I just can't see urban professionals organizing themselves around biking to work here. But we have most of the same pre-existing conditions that New York City has.
With the exception of sprawl. We think that it has to do with weather and bike lanes, but it really doesn't. In a way, riding to work is kind of like letting your young child cross the street on her own for the first time, in that you don't want to, but you have to, but it'll probably be ok once it happens. The only difference is that we don't have to cycle anywhere. Toronto is almost purely designed for the car. And please don't tell me that the TTC is a viable option for the future. Our fares are among the highest, our system among the most unsustainable, and we won't even adopt a smartcard to replace tokens. The TTC has to be the only transit organization in the world that actually mints its own currency. It's already a laughing stock now with its anti-progressive ways, its downward spiral in value, and a blundering municipal government behind it that is at best confused.
And so ends another post that started off with an actual point and degraded into a statement that Toronto is backwards. All I'm saying is, none of the things that we like to think prevent this city from having a good cycling culture actually do so. It's just sprawl. And no one talks about that.
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