EDITOR’S NOTE: There has been some debate about whether bike lanes on Bloor would hurt or harm businesses. Spacing is republishing this infographic from our Fall 2014 issue to help inform the discussion.
In March 2014, the Ryerson University Urban and Regional Planning studio group, Ryerson Planning and Consulting, examined visitors’ and merchants’ opinions about potential changes to street use allocation, including implementation of active transit, along stretches of Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue. The Toronto Centre for Active Transportation hopes that the study will be used to inform further discussion of the relationship between parking, active transportation, and business.
top photo by Danielle Scott
3 comments
Thank you!
I hope Mayor Tory and all councillors read this.
Thanks; it helps. A further help would be to encourage corridor thinking. What are the #s of people who go through this Bloor area by transit first, then by car (count the people in them please), and walking and by bike. If we valued corridor thinking and the Big Picture, the subway would be the #1 mode, and as it clearly needs relief, having a parallel bikeway would be the cheapest and fastest IF it was done for a length ie. the 8kms from High Park to Sherbourne. This same distance was to be studied as per a 2006 motion – but improving subway efficiencies isn’t part of the PWIC mandate. Nor the TTC, unless it involves a lot of cost and concrete, or so it seems.
Bikes aren’t always the ‘fix’; but in the urban core are clearly superior, so let’s hope we can provide that continuity sometime very soon given in 1992, Bloor/Danforth was found to be #1 for an east-west route in the first study.
If or when bike lane’s are put in on Bloor I think people will show up either by foot or bike just because it’s new. In doing so a person who really never shopped there before might say let’s come back again.