The route to cycling can be quick

There was a lot of fascinating information at the “Traffic Tales” movie night put on by the Toronto Public Space Committee last night, but the thing I found most remarkable was how quickly the number of cyclists increased when a city took extensive and concrete measures to improve cycling infrastructure. Paris, London and Bogota saw the number of cyclists increase by double or more in just 3-6 years once they created a connected network of dedicated, safe cycling routes within the city. In Bogota, the former mayor said that the number of trips made by bicycle, as a percentage of all trips, increased from less than 1% to 5% in the space of six years.

In the discussion afterwards, Les Kelman, Traffic Management Centre Director for the City of Toronto, backed this up from his own experience. He said that, when it was first proposed to remove a lane of traffic from the Bloor St. Viaduct and replace it with bike lanes, he was sceptical because there was so little bike traffic. But once the lanes were put in, the bike traffic increased exponentially. He added that this experience had changed his thinking about bike infrastructure. He learned, he said, that “if you build it, they will come.”