A cyclist riding south over sharrows (painted bike symbol) on Spadina Ave., on July 30, 2020.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
When I was 18 years old I rode my electric-blue 10-speed to Amsterdam from Ostend, Belgium. The weather was fair, the land was flat and, best of all, I could travel most of the way on a network of bike paths. They were well-paved, well-marked and separated from the main roads. Many went along the tops of dikes, passing windmills and tulip fields. Some had their own traffic lights.
Half a century later, the Netherlands is even more welcoming to travellers on two wheels. Around a quarter of its 17 million residents cycle every day. Its ever-growing network of bike lanes goes just about everywhere. Amsterdam alone has more than 500 kilometres of them.
Its streets are full of bikes day and night. Sleek, angular, fixed-gear bikes. Big, heavy, black “Dutch granny” bikes. Cargo bikes with one or two kids in the bucket up front. Bikes with dogs in the handlebar basket. Amsterdam famously has more bikes than people: 780,000 residents, 880,000 bikes. They stream by in a never-ending parade. It’s a marvelous spectacle, a vision of how a city can break the tyranny of the automobile.
I wish Mark Saunders could see it. Mr. Saunders, Toronto’s former police chief, is running for mayor in the city’s special byelection on June 26. One of the burrs under his saddle is the growing network of bike lanes. He is spitting mad about them – or acts as if he is, anyway.
“Our streets and sidewalks are for everyone, not just bicycles,” he says on his website, as if some militant cyclist in a fluorescent helmet had proposed banning all but two-wheeled traffic from city streets. Families are stepping over needles in the park, he continues, yet “career politicians” (unlike him) have spent millions building bike lanes.
Though he insists “I’m not against bike lanes,” he wouldn’t stand for them on major roads “already paralyzed by congestion.” He would remove the lanes on University Avenue, the big downtown street flanked by hospitals. He would reconsider putting them in on Yonge Street and extending them on Bloor Street West. He would study “the impact of bike lanes on snow clearing.”
Mr. Saunders is part of a fine old Toronto tradition. For years now, suburban politicians have been ranting about the “war on the car.” Rob Ford rode all the way to the mayor’s office on suburban anger over downtowners and their bike lanes. One of the first things he did was rip out one of them. Who can forget broadcaster Don Cherry’s rant about bike-riding pinkos at Mr. Ford’s investiture?
If you look around, it all seems a little silly. Big cities all over the world have been building out their cycling networks. New York now has bike lanes on the Brooklyn Bridge and is planning a two-way bike boulevard on Broadway. Paris has a busy bike route on the Rue de Rivoli, once a traffic-choked artery on the Right Bank. London has 20,000 parking spaces for bicycles at transit stations so that commuters can bike and ride.
The aim of these changes is to make it easier for people to leave their cars at home, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making the roadways not more congested but less. One Paris study showed that car trips fell by close to 60 per cent over the past couple of decades, a result not just of bike lanes but of a whole suite of measures to limit car traffic on the core. Accidents were down and the air quality improved.
The Netherlands got serious about making life easier for cyclists after a wave of fatal traffic accidents in the 1970s. Demonstrators raged about the toll on children. The rate of road fatalities has plummeted in the decades since.
Not everything is perfect in bike paradise. Pedestrians have to watch their step in Amsterdam to avoid the streams of speeding, often rule-breaking cyclists, who will not hesitate to bark at unwary tourists who wander onto the pink bike path. Bike theft is a big problem, as it is in so many cities. Thousands of bikes end up being chucked into the canals every year by thieves or vandals; authorities have a special dredger for “bike fishing.” The city is wrestling with what to do about super-speedy e-bikes. And, yes, motorists complain about the new tyranny of the bicycle. Our taxi driver told us, “here, the bike is king.”
It’s a mild dictatorship, all the same. Cyclists share the city with trams, pedestrians, scooters and cars, a constant, absorbing urban ballet. It’s truly a marvel to witness. Mr. Saunders should really go over and have a look.