Annette Bike Lane Approved!

Yays:
Augimeri
Cho
Davis
De Baeremaeker
Del Grande
Filion
Giambrone
Heaps
Kelly
McConnell
Mihevc
Miller
Moeser
Moscoe
Palacio
Pantalone
Perks
Peruzza
Rae
Vaughan

Nays:
Ainslie
Di Giorgio
Feldman
Ford
Hall
Holyday
Lindsay Luby
Nunziata
Parker
Saundercook
Stintz

Email sent from bikeplan@toronto.ca:

Hello,

This is a final update on the Annette Street bike lanes. The outstanding section of the bike lane on Annette, between Runnymede and Jane, was approved by City Council yesterday evening, Thursday October 30th. This decision supports the recommendation of City staff which was presented as "Option 1" at the public meeting held on September 15th, 2008. The bike lanes will now be installed along both sides of Annette as the current road re-surfacing work is completed.

If you would like to read Council's Decision Document, it should be available Monday on the Agenda and Minutes page, which you can find here:

http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/2008/agendas/cc.htm

Thank you for your time and interest in this issue.

Regards,

Matthew Cowley
Public Consultation Unit
City of Toronto

Jeff Gray Globe and Mail, November 3, 2008

The fight over bike lanes that turned a sleepy stretch of Annette Street in Toronto's west end into a symbolic battle for cycling activists - and the people who loathe them - is finally over. Pedal power won.

It was always a mere 700 metres of bike lanes on a mostly residential four-lane road, but pro-cycling activists considered it a test of Toronto's resolve to quicken its sluggish approach to the city's 495-kilometre bike plan.

On one side of the battle lines were the bike advocates and local neighbourhood cyclists who packed community meetings and said the route was perfect for bike lanes. On the other were the handful of small businesses that line the route, who fear the loss of half of the street's parking spaces and are angry about delays to messy roadwork under way for months.

Thursday night, cycling supporters on council led by Councillor Adrian Heaps (Ward 35, Scarborough Southwest), the chairman of the city's cycling committee, voted to reverse a plan pushed by the local councillor, Bill Saundercook (Ward 13, Parkdale-High Park), meant to appease bike-lane opponents.

The defeated plan would have seen "sharrows" - painted arrows meant to remind drivers to share the road - instead of proper bike lanes with solid lines, and would have left the parking supply untouched. Mr. Saundercook said bike lanes could instead be implemented after a two-year review.

Instead, thanks to Mr. Heaps, this stretch of Annette, like the rest of it, will get fully fledged bike lanes - which a city study insists will still leave ample room for parking - whenever the seemingly endless roadwork along the street ends.

Mr. Heaps, who pledged to paint 50 kilometres of bike lanes this year, spearheaded a streamlining of the approval process to stop local councillors from gumming up bike-lanes.

But now, after the Annette fight, Mr. Heaps acknowledged in an interview that he is looking at ways to get paint onto pavement even faster, by bringing forward a massive blitz of several years' worth of bike lanes at once.

The proposed bike budget, he said, will be $7.9-million next year, up from $5.5-million this year. To keep from getting bogged down in local fights, Mr. Heaps acknowledged he is looking at ways that lanes could be brought directly to city council, where pro-cycling councillors usually have the needed votes.

"There are ways to deal with this," Mr. Heaps said. "We are working on the most streamlined process possible."

While he would not go into details, this could mean somehow skipping the city's works committee, which approved Mr. Saundercook's sharrows, despite what Mr. Heaps said was overwhelming local support at a September public meeting.

Mike Soroka, co-owner of the Flower Room on Annette Street and an opponent of the bike lanes, said his walk-in business would likely sink 30 per cent because of the bike lanes and the lack of parking.

"I am little bit shocked that they are not willing to share the road," he said. "A lot of the cyclists, they don't have lights on the bike at night, they don't follow the rules of the road. And I don't think it's fair. I think it's gone too far the other way."

Mayor David Miller, who supported the bike lanes that run through his neighbourhood, said he and his children will now be able to safely ride their bikes to the local organic butcher - among the bike-lane opponents - and to the Humber River: "I was surprised to see the local organic butcher oppose the bike lanes, but there you go."