I was sailing along Richmond when it happened – a big-ass pickup and trailer parked in the middle of the bike lane. Screech.
It was right in front of a massive fenced-off hole in the ground marking the site of Toronto’s latest “sweet spot,” which is to say, a condo. They might have been on the job, but one of the most used lanes in the city isn’t an optimal place to park.
The blocking of bike lanes by oblivious drivers has been big news in Toronto lately. ICYMI, Toronto police have upped their complement of officers assigned to ticketing bike-lane blockers from one to three.
The news has been a big hit with cycling advocates. The city’s chief planner, bike-friendly Councillor Mike Layton, and cycling advocacy groups have all taken to social media to applaud the move. The bike-loving Danes have even taken notice. Toronto’s crackdown has made the news in bike mecca Copenhagen.
And yet I’m finding it hard to get excited. This is what it has come to in Toronto. So happy are we to get any crumbs when it comes to cycling that it’s hard to see the bigger picture, even when it seems like the city is trying to do us a good turn.
My first reaction was, “Only three?” Aren’t all parking enforcement officers supposed to be enforcing the rules of the road? My second thought was that we already have bylaw enforcement officers who are supposed to be tasked with ticketing offenders. But they can’t respond to complaints fast enough.
More to the point, with all the other challenges facing cycling in the city, it seems to me that money and effort could be better spent elsewhere – like designing better bike lanes (with parking as a buffer instead of along the curb) so vehicles can’t block them in the first place.
Easy to blame motorists, but there’s evidence to suggest bad design is the real culprit behind bike lane violations. For example, when the design of bike lanes on Gerrard was tweaked a couple of years back, bike lane violations disappeared pronto.
Turns out most bike lane violators are not John Q. Public but delivery drivers who are more or less inclined to keep messing with the law because it’s the cost of doing business. Parking enforcement officer and Twitter celebrity/bike superhero Kyle Ashley estimates that 90 per cent of bike lane blockers are delivery vehicles.
Canada Post, one of the worst offenders, according to Ashley, has promised to clean up its act amid the wave of recent publicity. But there’s little incentive to do that because the dirty little secret is that businesses can get a whack of tickets forgiven by the city under a dispute-resolution system geared toward helping the city avoid having to take Canada Post and others to court and accruing legal fees.
A more effective way of dealing with delivery vehicles would be to establish drop-off and pick-up zones downtown, as well as restrictions on delivery times, which is what cycling advocates have been calling for. That would go a longer way toward not only keeping bike lanes clear but cutting smog and congestion downtown.
So why is everyone peeing with glee (not my words but borrowed from one cycling proponent) about more cops handing out tickets to bike-lane violators?
Cycling advocates say that the police are finally taking seriously the job of busting illegal behaviour in real time.
I get it. Cyclists need to protect hard-won turf.
But (and I know I will be blown off for saying this) sometimes we can get a little too precious about anyone encroaching on bike lanes for any reason.
A proposal last November, for example, to allow motorists with accessible parking permits to use separated lanes to load and unload passengers was called “bad policy” by Cycle Toronto because it risked increasing confrontation between cyclists and pedestrians.
We risk a similar backlash with the increased enforcement of bike lanes for the 10 per cent who aren’t delivery drivers, especially when the city moves to streamline its ticketing system later this year to make it easier to ding bike-lane blockers.
That’s right. Come fall, there will be no need for designated officers to patrol bike lanes and place a ticket on the windshield. The city will allow law enforcement to snap photos of bike-lane violators and send tickets in the mail.
Who really wins in this motorists versus bike lanes set up?
Certainly the city, at least financially. Some 6,000 tickets at $150 a pop are reportedly written annually for bike-lane violators, a number that is sure to rise exponentially. The cops, too, score some good PR, and they can use all they can get right now.
But if the objective of this enforcement effort is public awareness (and I don’t think it is), educating drivers on the dos and don’ts when it comes to bike lanes would be more effective.
Spacing magazine designed a campaign a few years back to get cars out of bike lanes, and it demonstrated the lasting power of getting people to stop and think.
Shaming works, too.
Before bike cops came riding along to save the day, it was the bike community that took up the cause, with cheeky campaigns and websites to out bike-lane violators and encourage them to think twice about blocking bike lanes. Because, let’s face it, we all bend the rules of the road sometimes.
For the city, however, public education just doesn’t seem to have the same political cachet. Which is why this bike lane effort smells more like a money grab/PR campaign than a real solution, along the lines of Mayor John Tory’s campaign promise to fight traffic congestion.
Indeed, it was only a couple of weeks ago that Ashley, the cop initially assigned to the task of ticketing bike-lane hogs, was reportedly being reassigned. The suggestion was that he was perhaps spending more time on Twitter publicizing his exploits than writing tickets.
There is a quota, after all, for parking enforcement officers. And they’re not going to make it by only ticketing bike-lane violators. Time will only tell what that means for the future of the so-called Bike Lane Support Squad.
For now, they’ll be riding shotgun in a bike lane near you.
enzom@nowtoronto.com | @enzodimatteo
