Biking in Toronto is a marvellous way to travel — and with the recent addition of the long-awaited Bloor bike lane (stretching all the way from Shaw St. to Avenue Rd) it’s gotten even more convenient for commuters to move about the city on two wheels than ever before.
In a world full of more climate-change-conscious citizens, cities are putting a greater emphasis on bikes in order to provide people with a cheaper, healthier and more environmentally-friendly alternative to cars. By providing greater opportunity for bikers to roll freely through the streets, city planners can reduce the greenhouse gases created by slow-moving traffic every day in their city.
But, as the all-important maxim of ‘build more bike lanes and they will come’ plays out, other biking infrastructure needs to increase as well. In some areas, downtown Toronto’s allotted bike parking is already stuffed full to bursting. Finding a space to park at popular events, in highly populated areas or during rush hour is already a struggle. With the Toronto City Cycling Network Ten Year Plan being rolled out, greater numbers of bikes can be expected to make their way into the city, and they’re going to need a place to park.
Toronto has a grand total of 17,000 bike rings on its streets and boulevards for that growing number of bike commuters to use. I know I’m reaching for the stars here, but compared to the much less populated city of Amsterdam, with its incredible multi-level bike parking, Toronto’s 17,000 rings for a city of 2.6 million people (as of 2011) seems a pretty small number of spaces and a pretty limited method of providing parking space. There’s a lot of room for improvement.
Hope is on the horizon. Thanks to the Queen West bike study report done in 2013, the city knows that something needs to be done. Funding was set aside in this year’s Capital Budget to address the need for bike parking, and to implement the ideas successfully tested in the Queen West study.
One initiative that’s been fully adopted already is providing bike parking at major transit hubs throughout the GTA. Metrolinx is providing reserved bike parking at Go stations in Burlington and Hamilton. There are also bike parking locations at Union Station and at Victoria Park station in Scarborough. Hopefully, if these initial bike parking options show promise, regional and local transit providers will expand on the space being supplied to bike commuters.
Another option that is being explored is to add more bike corrals. The larger bike parking apparatuses take up only a single parking space, but hold 14 bicycles. Four of these have been installed downtown already, and were part of the Queen West bike study. If all the study information points in the right direction, we could see more of these corrals popping up in areas that desperately need the extra bike parking space.
Priorities remain the main question on the lips of citizens as council mulls over different strategies. When the city wants to make parking happen, it can certainly do so: since 2005, Toronto has offered free, on-street ‘pay and display’ parking to 300 motorbikes and scooters in thirty locations around the vital sections of the city. The move was made to encourage green alternatives to driving in the city. While there has been humming and hawing about charging for the spaces, they remain as they were intended, and supply free parking every day to 300 motorcyclists from the GTA. The city obviously has the energy and organization to make large volumes of ‘green’ parking happen — it’s now just a question of commitment.
While the ways in which people are commuting around Toronto change — the recent decline in ridership numbers for the TTC prove that not everything can be predicted — it does appear obvious that biking is becoming more and more important to the city. The options are on the table, the money has been allocated. Now it’s time to get to work.
