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Bike lanes could be coming to Bloor

The on-again, off-again study of a controversial plan to install bike lanes on Bloor Street is back on course.

The Public Works and Infrastructure Committee voted on Monday to commission an environmental assessment that would examine the possibility of bike lanes on Toronto’s major East-West corridor in conjunction with a traffic study of Dupont.

The bike lane study still has to be approved by council, but Monday’s vote is a step forward for a project that has been at the top of the cycling community’s wish list for years.

“It’s a good day for cycling in Toronto,” said Jared Kolb, executive director of bike advocacy group Cycle Toronto. “This is now back on the agenda, which is an important move.”

According to a city staff report, building bike lanes on Bloor would be “challenging” because in some stretches the road is only 12.2-metres wide, traffic volumes reach up to 45,000 vehicles per day, and there is a high demand for commercial loading and parking spots.

But while opponents argue that removing car lanes and on-street parking to make way for cycle tracks could hurt Bloor’s many small retail businesses, Kolb says that other cities’ experiences show that cycling infrastructure can actually boost the local economy.

In New York City a recent Department of Transportation report found that the completion of the 9th Avenue separated cycle track corresponded with a 49-per-cent increase in retail sales on the street.

Some Toronto businesses are on board with the Bloor bike lane idea. Wade McCallum, chair of the Bloor Annex Business Association, says that only 20 per cent of customers who shop in the area arrive by car and bike lanes would encourage more people to visit the neighbourhood shops. His group supports the bike lane study.

And while Jason Lee, vice-chair of the Korea Town BIA, says his organization has yet to have a formal discussion about it, he’s seen first hand how bikes can help fuel a brisk business.

“My parents have a small little restaurant in Korea Town and we see a lot of customers that come in with bikes,” he said. “For us it’s always encouraging to see more people in our neighbourhood, and we can’t just rely on the car.”

Despite buy-in from some retailers, Councillor Mike Layton says he’s hearing objections to the bike lane project from business owners in his Trinity Spadina ward. An avid cyclist and one of council’s biggest bike boosters, Layton predicts that it will require “a delicate conversation” to balance the concernss of business owners and the needs of riders, but he supported the EA at public works to get more information about the potential effect on the neighbourhood.

“Hopefully, we continue this through so we can at least have an adult conversation about what’s going on,” he said. “We don’t even know what the actual impacts will be.”

Public works chair Denzil Minnan-Wong was the only councillor on the six-member committee to not support the EA.

“[Bloor] is an important corridor for vehicular traffic… Traffic is exceedingly congested now and to take out existing road capacity for cars is not something I support,” he said.

The city first commissioned a Bloor bike lane assessment back in 2010, and although initial work was already underway it was stopped the following year after Rob Ford was elected mayor. Roughly $60,000 was spent on the project.

While the original assessment would have examined putting bike lanes along a lengthy 24-kilometre stretch of Bloor from Kipling Ave. to Kingston Rd., the study now being proposed is much smaller and scope and would only look at the stretch from Keele to the Prince Edward Viaduct. A motion to include Danforth as part of the assessment was voted down.

Because the transportation department was already planning a congestion study on nearby Dupont, staff recommended that the Bloor assessment be completed in conjunction with that report in order to save money and take into account how bike infrastructure on Bloor would affect traffic patterns in other parts of the city.

If approved by council next month, the combined Dupont-Bloor study would begin next fall and cost an estimated $450,000. Staff say it would take about a year to complete.

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