The avenue being touted as the north-south alternative to Jarvis will require some radical rethinking to make separated bike lane plans a reality. The hazards and obstacles are many.
Bloor bottleneck
The top of Sherbourne at Bloor is a traffic nightmare. Cars lining up to make rights and lefts onto Bloor and dropping off or picking up passengers at the subway station block the bike lane going north, making navigation of this section hazardous for everyone. Prohibiting cars from turning onto Bloor may be part of the answer, but that would mean pushing car traffic through Rosedale, and weren’t they the folks who opposed bike lanes on Jarvis?
Offloading
The commercial sections of Sherbourne south of Queen, where condos are also going up, throw another wrench in the works. There, space for the day-to-day business of delivering goods, etc, is severely limited. And we haven’t even begun to talk about how to fit in snow clearing and garbage pickup.
Big-time barriers
If the idea is to link Queens Quay to Bloor, a must given future development at East Bayfront along the lakeshore, then city engineers and planners will have to get creative about how to get bike lanes underneath the rail overpass and Gardiner Expressway at the foot of Sherbourne. Solving that one could blow the entire bike budget.
Transit complications
Regular bus service on Sherbourne presents another challenge. Right now, buses block bike lanes when they have to pick up passengers. Bus bays would alleviate the problem, but that would mean putting bus stops much further apart, where road width would accommodate bays.
Parking problems
Parking is still allowed on long stretches of Sherbourne even during morning and evening rush hours. No getting around this one: the only solution would be to remove parking, which is easier said than done.
Space case
Unlike Jarvis, Sherbourne is a minor arterial with two lanes of car traffic compared to Jarvis’s four. In long stretches, like here, between Carlton and Gerrard, the street is too narrow to accommodate separated lanes – unless the plan is to steal space from sidewalks and do away with existing parking.
