We asked and asked. They listened (Councillor Perks did, anyway). But, alas, the Star reported this morning “Bike plan hits funding wall“:
The city’s chronic shortage of money has killed a move to add almost $18 million to complete an ambitious bike plan by 2012.
City council’s budget committee voted only to support the project in principle, with a report to come later on whether it’s affordable without cancelling other important projects.
The city’s 2008 capital budget allocates $5.5 million next year for bike lanes, but that should be raised to $7.7 million, said Franz Hartmann, executive director of the Toronto Environmental Alliance.
Councillor Gord Perks’ bid to add $17.9 million to the bike plan between 2009 and 2012 ran into opposition on the budget committee.
“I don’t want to increase the budget by $17 million right now,” said Councillor Shelley Carroll, the budget committee chair.
The bike plan called for 230 kilometres of bike lanes by last year. Instead, only about 70 kilometres have been created.
Mr. Hartmann is right — the Transportation budget for bikes should be at $7.7 illion for the City to meet it’s own targets. It is also worth pointing out that Mayor Miller promised $6.2 million for the bike budget when he was campaigning in 2006.
Councillor Perks’ motion was not to add new monies — it was to move the money allotted to the 2013-2017 time frame for almost all of the trails and pathways projects forward to the 2008-2012 budget schedule. This should make sense since the City says it is going to complete the Bike Plan by 2012.
But I don’t believe the City of Toronto’s Bike Plan is “ambitious”, as the Star states. The plan calls for just under 400 km of on-street bike lanes to be built — but only 70 km currently exist. Chicago has just released a truly ambitious bike plan and currently has about 315 km on-street lanes (not to mention their fabulous bike station). New York currently has 790 km, including the bouroughs.
The City has not even come close to keeping pace with the Bike Plan. This year the City promised to hit the easy target of 27 kilometres for new on-street bike lanes. We current have 7.5 km, including the brand new one on the Queensway and the sharrows on Lansdowne (to be detailed in another Star story on Friday.)
Properly funding the Bike Plan will only have positive effects for Toronto — it will mitigate the problems of traffic congestion, poor air quality, over-capacity transit, cyclists injuries and deaths, as well as the costly burden on our health-care system because of all these things. Instead of allocating a few million more dollars a year to the Bike Plan the spends a wasteful amount on much less useful capital projects such as the straightening the Dufferin Jog at Queen near the Gladstone (estimated at $33 million in this local paper, although there are rumours that the price tag is closer to $100 million) or the infamous Front Street Extension (an estimated $50 million is held in lieu for the project)?
So, what next?
The Budget schedule shows that the wrap up meeting is next Wednesday, November 21st. The Executive Committee is to approve it on November 26th, and then it is all finalized on December 11th.
There is still time to apply pressure on the Budget and Executive Committees to adequately fund the City’s own plans for implementing an entirely reasonable amount of bike infrastructure, in an entirely reasonable amount of time (the deadline for the Bike Plan was was quietly extended for one-year with the City’s climate change plan).
I spoke to Councillor Perks today and he was optimistic that there is still a chance to get his plan back on the agenda via the Executive Committee.
A few things you can do:
• contact your local councillor and ask them to support funding for completion of the entire Bike Plan
• contact the Executive Committee if you want them to up the funding for bikes.
21 comments
Oh my God, that Chicago bike centre looks cool!
The Front Street Extension shouldn’t, and won’t get built: there’s the money we need for cycling!
McDonald’s Bike Centre?
Yep, naming rights to Chicago’s bike station were sold to the fast food chain for $5 million US.
An exhaustive tour de force – or is that tour de farce?
It’s quite frustrating given the weakness of the Bike Plan in the core area, and that to put a bike lane on a street is in theory just $25,000 a km. Painting 8kms of Bloor from High Park to Sherbourne should thus be $200K, and to do the new expanded study of a Bloor/Danforth bikeway from Royal York to Vic Park might be say $500,000 – which is 1% of the money that’s parked for the Front St. Extension. And one assumes that would be 20% of the annual interest too. The FSE has ignored such obvious transit options like the GO train, which the province is expanding by 20% soon through longer trains. As many of our core progressives still support this Edsel – eg. Joe Pantalone, Adam Giambrone, Mayor Miller – they clearly don’t get that fighting climate change means avoiding costly car projects and funding sensible bike projects – like squeezing cars a bit all along the major subway.
These guys are getting clueless when it comes to energy policy too – oil is essentially at $100/brl too – is there a plan?
And did you see the story that Joe is asking for another $17M to “upgrade” a pet project at the Ex?
http://www.thestar.com/article/276687 even though this project won’t save a life, but a bike lane might.
Caronto is carrupt.
Cycling is great fitness… obviously corporations have no sense of irony.
Never mind the FSE, we’re too busy backstopping a Ballroom at Joe Pantalone’s Playground to be building bikelanes.
Not sure if its been noted yet or not but a new bike lane was painted on Greenwood from Danforth to Queen E. Google Earth tells me thats exactly 2 km…
Does it count as 4 km if there’s one in each direction?
The money for the conference centre on EX grounds is a loan – the City is guaranteeing the loan…so it is a ‘no dollars out’ kind of deal. I would’ve liked to us that as a comparison.
Another comparison woudl be the cost of new streetcars. About 7M for 240 new streetcars…so what Councillor Perks is proposing for Parks costs less than 3 street cars!
And, yes, Greenwood is part of that 7.5 total.
More on NY: Their Bike Master Plan, one of the initiatives outlined in Mayor Bloomberg’s environmental PlaNYC, includes installing 504 miles of physically separated bike paths and 1,296 miles of lanes marked by stripes of white paint by 2030. (That’s 811 km and 2086 km, respectively)…
Not to mention European cities where they appear to be *competing* to build the best bike infrastructure:
http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/11/12/when-in-rome-share-bikes/
If Toronto wants to be amibitious and innovative, it will need more money for the bike plan – and not in 2013
I agree that this is ridiculous. Major transit projects have long time-frames, so you’d think there’s be enthusiasm at council about the fast-and-cheap transportation upgrade that bike lanes provide.
Lack of funding is a problem, but I think the biggest challenge is a lack of political will to win over local business communities worried about losing street parking. They need to see the improved streetscapes and foot traffic that bike-laned streets bring! That’s a battle that’s fought store-to-store, and something we can all help with.
Let’s remember the BikePlan is more than just painted lanes – it also includes signed routes and park paths – anyone know how many of them were added this year?
Signed routes and park paths are an interesting part of the plan. The signed routes mean nothing at all: they don’t protect me from cars. I don’t think drivers inside their armour see those little blue signs. Hell, I miss them on my bike unless I am looking for them. Park paths are the easiest for the city to put in, because drivers and merchants don’t bitch. There are a lot of parks and hydro or rail corridors that could yet use this treatment. The city ought to do all of these as easy work. Once there is momentum, then start squeezing lanes away from parking.
Borrowing multi-millions isn’t quite as “free” beyond the obvious paying of things back. We are getting to the point where there’s a huge amount of money going to pay off previous loans, and I’d suggest there’s a lot of vulnerability to external changes, not including trying some year to do something about climate change.
Bike lanes can be much better overall investments than such pet projects that Mr. Pantalone wants.
And borrowing for high-end projects while basic things lapse can be seen on Bloor St. where the City is using it’s borrowing power to do a $25M redo of one km of Bloor St. that the local BYBIA will pay back, yet a bit further east, we see/encounter consistent ongoing basic lack of maintenance problems that have some danger to them (one eg. is case of a full-lane width pond; another how we can’t seem to add paint/signage in bad situations)
thanks for the links – yet another idea for Bloor!
$18 million for Bike Paths- not Subway Security Cameras
Interesting. Councillor Giambrone has $18 million to buy subway security surveillance cameras- which are known to not actually prevent crime as it happens- but as the Chair of the TTC- has not enabled funding for $18 million for bicycle paths, which are essential to the greening of the city.
This City Council is not supporting its own greening policies, and is contravening human rights codes for privacy.
Toronto is becoming a less and less a liveable city.
It is time to use other methods at our disposal to force the municipal government to provide safer active transport infrastructure (bike lanes) on all arterial roads in Toronto.
Completing the cycling route network envisioned in the official BIKE PLAN, would only serve to further marginalize cycling for years to come.
When first proposed, many cyclists signed on to the inadequate network as a flawed but necessary first step to improving active transport infrastructure, but the city has again proved itself impotent when it comes to dealing with inconvenient realities such as the health and welfare of our most responsible, not to mention vulnerable, city travellers.
Thankfully there are a number of avenues to be explored at the provincial level. Word of one such strategy involving, the Ministry of Labour’s Health and Safety Act should be ready for public debate early in the new year.
Timid local politicians needn’t be a obstacle in this scenario, eh?
As hamish points out, while we guarantee the loan we must assume the possibility of default – those who assesses the City’s debt rating (and thus how much interest we pay on the rapidly appreciating municipal debt) will certainly do so.
Sarah – the money for the cameras was federal money which couldn’t be re-allocated to bike lanes. It is unfortunate that Howard Moscoe while TTC chair totally bought into the hysteria about Toronto as a terrorist target and pushed for this project, as if we weren’t a world class city if we weren’t hated enough to be blown up.
The rest of Canada hates us of course, but rather than resort to explosives they just relish that we are politically under-represented by population, that our tax dollars continue to subsidise suburban and rural lifestyles and that we still haven’t had a Cup in 40 years but can be obsessed about a kid’s unwise use of a cellphone camera.
Joe Pantalone should come to this forum and explain his actions or should I say inaction in regards to bicycle lanes.He is quick to point at others when they break their promises, c’mon Joe face the music and explain your total flip-flop!And your total mis-use of public funds for a ballroom and hotel.Could there be somebody out there that may benefit here?Please come forward with the details of financing and who is benefiting from this contract.
It’s not just lack of money, we have a council bogged down and unable to take action.
Cycling budgets aren’t even depleted each year.
It’s ridiculous that we don’t have the will to eliminate a few on-street parking spaces that take up valuable land.
Here here Dan! The parking has got to go – some off of Queen, some off of Bloor and so many other places I can think of.
I heard that Gord Perks wants a bike lane on Roncesvalles – the ONLY way that would happy is to remove the on-street parking on one side.
thanks all for the comments…it ain’t over yet!
Bike sharrows- painted arrows indicating bike paths- are not dedicated bike lanes. They are dangerous for bicyclists as they indicate where bikes could be if they could fit on a road beside traffic. A little bit of paint does not a bike lane make- so be careful on the deceptive spin on painted lanes as given by the City of Toronto…Toronto needs dedicated and safe bike paths…and we deserve them far more than this massive development then we are getting on Front Street…