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Down with bad bikers!

When news broke this week that the speeding cyclist who allegedly fractured a pedestrian’s skull is facing only a $400 fine, you could almost hear car-huggers across the city start howling that it’s time for police to crack down on bikers who break the law. More tickets, bigger fines, and stiffer penalties, motorists say. And they’re right. Just not for the reasons they think they are. Aggressively prosecuting bad bikers would be good for cycling in this city.

While Tuesday’s incident at Dundas and Huron sounds particularly nasty (luckily the 56-year-old who was struck is expected to recover), it alone is no reason to alter the way cyclists are policed, any more than a single car crash dictates we should outlaw cars. Cyclist-pedestrian collisions are so rare and so minor that the city doesn’t even keep track of them. According to Toronto’s transportation services department bikes cause a fatality about once every 10 years, a pittance compared to the near daily car-related deaths we see. Renegade cyclists simply aren’t the hell-on-wheels menace to public safety some would have you believe.

No, the need for better enforcement of unlawful cyclists is more self-serving. On the face of it, the protracted battle that cycling advocates are waging against Rob Ford’s administration is for better infrastructure: more bike lanes, separated ones preferably. But the broader issue is getting policy-makers to recognize that bikes are not recreational vehicles best relegated to off-road trails (which is what Ford’s new bike plan is pushing), but indispensable forms of urban transportation that citizens use to get to work, to go shopping, and do everything else that keeps our city going. It’s hard to sell the idea that building cycling infrastructure is the responsible thing to do if cyclists irresponsibly break the most basic traffic laws with impunity.

Bad cycling behaviour, real or perceived, makes it politically difficult for councillors to support bike lanes and other goodies.

“I think that when cyclists break rules of the road, it doesn’t necessarily help the cause, especially with the current climate at city hall,” said Andrea Garcia of the Toronto Cyclist Union. “I think it’s more important than ever that we don’t give reasons to folks who are already against bike infrastructure to not want to give cyclists space on the road.”

Many bike advocates argue, with good reason, there’s little point in cracking down on cycling infractions when Toronto’s cycling infrastructure is so piss-poor it often invites riders to go the wrong way down one way streets to reach their destination. That’s true, but it’s also apparent that even where cycling infrastructure is decent cyclists still break the law because doing so is convenient and holds few legal repercussions.

While asinine drivers will frequently do potentially deadly things, our well-established car culture dictates there are maneuvers most drivers would never do. At 2 am, on a deserted street with no one in sight, the vast majority of drivers will stop at a red light. And that’s the kind of extremely basic, respect-the-bare-minimum-of-rules bike culture we need to have in this city. There should be some illegal moves that cyclists never dare make because the consequences are too big. These moves include, but may not be limited to: running stop lights on main streets, riding the wrong direction on main streets, and riding on the sidewalk, anywhere.

Tickets for these infractions should be given out aggressively and often. The fines need not be huge (say $50 to $100), but bad bikers need to be looking over their shoulders in fear every time they break these basic rules. Current law is so lax it allows for bikes with smaller wheels (and even motorized scooters) to legally tear-ass down the sidewalk.

Many of the suggestions floated by the anti-bike crowd in the wake of high-profile cyclist-induced accidents are absurd. Cracking down on bikers who run stop signs on back-streets would not make our roads safer and would be unnecessarily punitive. Licensing bikers would require a costly cycling education system that the city will never fund, and besides it’s not lack of skill or knowledge that causes bikers to break the law, it’s the lack of punishment.

Aggressively prosecuting basic cycling infractions isn’t anti-bike, in fact it’s the opposite. That type of selfish riding is as detrimental to other cyclists as it is to drivers. I can think of few things more maddening than peddling down a busy street, cars whizzing by you on your left, and seeing a biker emerge ahead of you in your lane, heading straight towards you. It makes you wish the bike centre at Canadian Tire sold a ten-foot harpoon that could be easily affixed to your handlebars.

Like a lot of bikers in this town, I break the law a half-dozen times within the course of a 20 minute ride. But these days I rarely run red lights, and never take the sidewalk. I am a sort of born-again safe cyclist, converted to the faith by two disasters. One was a personally catastrophic day last year when I got two tickets in four hours to the tune of $100 each. The other was the more broadly devastating meeting at city hall last month that approved the removal of two bike lanes in Scarborough and launched a sneak attack to remove the Jarvis bike lanes, ensuring that for the first time ever Toronto will end the year with fewer bike lanes than it started with.

Those experiences convinced me that tickets encourage good cycling, but more importantly that cyclists can’t wait for the Rob Fords of the world to be won over. Even if we had the Lance Armstrong of mayors we will never get bike lanes that take us exactly where we need to go. Many of Toronto’s major streets (Queen Street comes to mind) are wholly unsuitable for bike lanes. We’re destined to ride on the road with everyone else.

Now is a critical time in the history of cycling in Toronto. There are more bikers on the streets than ever, our public bike-sharing system just hit 100,000 rides in only two months, and cycling advocacy is at a fever pitch.

In the parlance of sloganeering, as Toronto peddles into the Great Cycling Future bikers need to learn how to “own the road.” And that’s tough to do when we abandon the road and the rules that govern it whenever it suits us.

There are a lot of us on the streets these days. The best way to ensure our safety is to overwhelm drivers, politely and confidently, with our sheer numbers and bloody-minded predictability to ride, en masse, taking up large swathes of street to move, in herds, into the centre left-turn lane. Doing so is the legal right of cyclists, but drivers won’t respect those rights if they see us breaking the law every 30 seconds and getting away with it.

That means we need to learn to obey at least the basic rules, and while it would be nice if we could to do that voluntarily, we probably can’t. So let the tickets fly.

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