A debate over the city’s bike plan Tuesday was so heated that at one point a councillor was threatened with expulsion from the chamber, but it ended with an anti-climax as the decisive vote was postponed until Wednesday.
Bike lane supporters, many of them symbolically wearing their bike helmets, had packed the council chamber and repeatedly broke out in loud applause throughout the proceedings, which dragged on for nearly six hours until council convened for the day at 8 pm.
Despite the lengthy, and at times tedious, debate Andrea Garcia of the Toronto Cyclists Union remained upbeat when asked if she was disappointed nothing had been decided Tuesday. “It’s always nice to have a resolution for these things. But it will happen tomorrow morning and we’ll know then,” she said with a smile.
On council’s agenda was the Mayor’s Bike Plan, an update to the 10-year-old Bikeway Network that proposes a mixed bag of cycling infrastructure, including creating Toronto’s first separated bike lanes downtown, but also removing two lanes in Scarborough and the new lanes on Jarvis.
The Jarvis bike lanes were only installed last year and have become a flashpoint for downtown bike activists who say that they’re proof cyclists and drivers can co-exist. Since the bike lanes were added and Jarvis was reduced to four car lanes last year, bike traffic on the street has increased 300 per cent with minimal negative impact on travel times for cars.
Rob Ford has pledged to remove the Jarvis lanes, which city staff estimates would cost $200,000, leading some critics to question whether his plans for Jarvis are ideologically motivated. The mayor has been scouring the city’s budget for ways to cut costs in order to bridge a projected $774-million shortfall next year.
In Toronto these days debates about biking are emotional affairs and at one point Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker tested the limits of civility by insinuating he would hold Ford responsible if any cyclists were killed on Jarvis should the bike lanes be removed.
“I hope that if someone here is killed or maimed the mayor will send flowers,” De Baeremaeker said. He then challenged Ford to ride with him down Jarvis during rush hour and told him to “Be a man!”
Speaker Frances Nunziata repeatedly admonished De Baeremaeker for the outburst and eventually asked that security remove him from the council chamber. De Baeremaeker apologized and was allowed to stay.
Ford holds influence over the majority of councillors and there was little to indicate Tuesday that those on either side of the polarizing debate had softened their positions. But Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam did present a compromise that cycling advocates are hoping will win over a few members on Ford’s team.
Wong-Tam, who presides over the ward that contains the Jarvis bike lanes, introduced three motions that moved toward middle ground in the cycling debate. She proposed at least delaying the removal of the Jarvis lanes until proposed separated bike lanes on neighbouring Sherbourne Street are built sometime next year.
In a separate, more divisive motion, she asked that a formal consultation process with the public be held before any decision is made about Jarvis. Wong-Tam believes that the Ford administration gave her ward the run around by dropping a last-minute motion at a committee meeting last month that proposed killing the Jarvis bike lanes. She says Councillor John Parker, a Ford ally, came to her moments before the motion and told her he had been ordered to scrap the lanes.
Although the mayor has made it clear which way he wants councillors to vote on Jarvis, Wong-Tam hopes some Fordist councillors will be swayed by the idea that local taxpayers need to have a say.
“There was absolutely no consultation, and no notice given not even to myself as a local councillor,” she said. “I think that even the councillors that are from the suburbs are saying, ‘I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. Maybe it’s better to send that back to the community.'”
Debate on Jarvis and the rest of the Bikeway Network will resume at 9:30 am Wednesday.
