Given this high fatality rate, Ontario’s chief coroner last month launched the first ever province-wide review of cycling deaths. The investigation will probe bike-related fatalities from 2006 to 2010, attempting to identify common denominators and recommend measures to prevent such tragedies in future.
One person passionately concerned about bike safety, both in Toronto and around the world, is Gil Penalosa, a strategic consultant for the Danish firm Gehl Architects and a world-renowned expert on sustainable transportation. I spoke with him last week about cycling deaths in Toronto.
Calling our current unseparated bike lines “kamikaze lanes,” Penalosa, the former commissioner of parks, sports and recreation in Bogota, Colombia, says there is one main question to ask before building a bike lane: Is it safe enough for my 8-year-old child and my 80-year-old grandparent? If not, then the general public will not embrace it.
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For Penalosa, a critical factor in promoting cycling safety involves lowering the speed in neighbourhoods to 30 kilometres per hour or less. According to numerous studies, the probability of a cyclist dying when hit by a car going 30 km/h is 5 per cent; that jumps to 80 per cent when a car is travelling 50 km/h. That is why the World Health Organization recommends 30 km/h speed limits in urban neighbourhoods, as does the European Union.
A second crucial factor is the construction of protected bike lanes, separating sidewalks, bike lanes, and then parked cars, sometimes on different levels, arranging them so that the parked cars serve to protect the cyclists.
“In Toronto,” he quips, “we have it the other way around. We have the cyclists protecting the parked cars.”
But Toronto doesn’t need bike lanes, it needs a bike grid, Penalosa argues. Unless there is a network of connectivity, a united matrix of bike lanes, then bike use will be severely constrained.
“Toronto is an ideal place for such a bike grid,” Penalosa observes. We are relatively flat, and have an urban rectangle of about 20 kilometres by 40 kilometres.”
For Penalosa, however, bike lanes are not an end in themselves, but a means to sustainable, vibrant cities. He observes that since protected bike lanes were installed in Copenhagen, the “rock star” of the bike lane world, 40 per cent of the population uses bikes as a principal means of transportation. In Toronto, by contrast, it is 2 per cent.
This results not only in less air pollution, fewer traffic jams and safer streets — it also leads to a more intimate, concentrated, livable and less alienating city centre.
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D - I have lamented about 'bike lane islands' being of no use.
Sad that K-W will spend huge money on light rail, but a decent network of bike trails - with the health care savings that come with that- seem to elude them.
What we have is a failure of imagination. And leadership...
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