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Illustration Sunday: Bicycle Expressway

By Kevin McBride

2008_06_01_IS_BIKEWAY.jpg
Who knew that the Gardiner was good for more than traffic jams? Between the Ride For Heart today, and the controversial Critical Mass ride last Friday, Toronto’s highways are getting plenty of bike traffic. As cycling continues to grow in popularity, could a bicycle expressway eventually become reality?
Illustration by Kevin McBride.

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  • Catherine Kustanczy

    let’s hope so -that would be amazing!
    nice drawing, Kevin.

  • PickleToes

    I can appreciate the importance of bike lanes, but is a bicycle expressway practical? Hardly anybody will have the stamina or time to ride their bikes over great distances; something that an expressway would cater to.

  • David Topping

    Bike lanes everywhere would do just fine, I’d think.

  • spacejack

    Build them and people will ride them. Maybe not everyone, and maybe not everyone can, but a lot of people would. There’s always another generation of young cyclists when the last one gets too middle-aged or suburbanized or whatever.

  • bbpsi

    I think the closest thing to a bicycle expressway would be wide, dedicated cycle paths in dedicated corridors like along the CN rail corridors.
    Not really sure what would be accomplished with expressway-style infrastructure for bikes; the great thing about them is their impact and footprint [physically] is so much lower that its not necessary.

  • TokyoTuds

    Yay for more bike infrastructure! But I think putting an inter-city rail line down the middle of the 401 or Gardiner is a better idea (not a “subway” line like proposed recently).
    Cheers,
    Tuds

  • PickleToes

    I like the rail suggestion.

  • Svend

    The easiest and cheapest bike highway right across the entire city would be along the Finch hydro corridor.
    It’s on the route for 3 GO train stations, a subway line, a major university, dozens of access connections to major north/south artial roads, many existing ravines and paths, the Toronto Zoo, even the airport could be reached!
    Buses could share the space so they can bypass traffic if desired.
    The land is vacant, can’t be used for anything else, and is a straight efficient line easily adapted to be an expressway for bikes and other non emission traffic. It could be done in stages, each section would be appreciated by local people. There would be no neighbourhood wars about reducing parking, no narrowing of roads, no noisy traffic, no pollution. Stop lights at each road crossing would be easy to fit in.
    The only difficulty would be building bridges over the 404 and 400 highways, since they are run by the province, we should press them to deliver them. Toronto would be eager to have this positive partnership.
    It would serve a diverse populated region all the way across Toronto that isn’t represented on our bike map. Some of the poorest and least fit among us would have a safe, cheap alternative to the car or transit. Let’s give these people positive choices to do the environmentally right thing.

  • PickleToes

    Today is a funny day because I find myself more agreeable than usual. I like this idea, particularly more so since its not downtown centric (as I find this website to sometimes be).

  • David Topping

    Cities are downtown-centric.

  • PickleToes

    That’s obviously true geographically. But if you didn’t live in Toronto and used this website as your primary source for info about the happenings of the city, you might loose sight of the other things going on out of the core. There’s much more to a city than it’s downtown; just ask the people who don’t live there.
    I don’t really mean this as a criticism of Torontoist, its more of an observation. I can’t really blame the focus though, there are almost certainly more fun things to do downtown.

  • matty

    Chicago may be fucked up in oh so many ways but we have a kick ass bike system. Almost all secondary roads have bike lanes (which is hundreds of miles) which drivers more often than not respect (unlike nyc). We are also in the process of transforming an abandoned elevated railway line which extends from downtown to several dense neighborhoods in the city. It will be an elevated bike highway.
    Critical mass is important for raisning bicyle awareness. Most of our bike lane projects I believe have been from our years and years of mass rides.

  • Ben

    Bicycle expressways (especially elevated ones) might be overkill, but bicycle boulevards would be great.