Here’s a piece by Marcus Gee in the Globe and Mail. It appears to have been prompted by a shocking proposal to install a BIKE LANE on Bloor St. Imagine the horror. There has been upset and concern over street parking from some merchants, but not all. This has prompted Mr. Gee to write:
Grow up, Toronto. It’s time to let street parking go
His attention having been drawn to the issue of parking, his opinions range across the small and large, from complaints by some small merchants to the effect of cheap or free parking in auto-dependent city design.
Surveys on Bloor have found that the vast majority of shoppers already arrive by transit, on foot or by bike anyway. So taking out a few dozen parking spaces shouldn’t cripple commerce there. Merchants are beginning to understand that, which may explain why the resistance to the new bike lanes has been muted so far. Studies on some New York streets showed that stores actually got more visitors after the city put in bike lanes.
Parking in downtown Toronto is too cheap and too plentiful, both on street and off. Absurdly, in a city that aims to encourage transit use, city hall requires developers to provide a certain number of parking spaces in new buildings. At a time when the city is trying to fight pollution, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and encourage walking and cycling, making parking scarcer and pricier is just good sense.
Following on an earlier post in Price Tags, here’s Janette Sadik-Khan on this topic, based on her time as Transportation Commissioner of New York City. Thanks to Peter Walker in the Guardian for the material:
She describes the approach as re-writing “the operating code of the street”. It is a perhaps uncomfortable philosophy for those, like previous generations of New Yorkers, used to being able to drive and park their cars more or less where they choose.
Urban transport is, Sadik-Khan argues, amid a “Copernican revolution” in which streets are remodelled around human beings, whether walking, cycling or on buses, rather than alone inside a speeding metal box.
“In the United States we spent the last century building our cities around the car, but we damaged our cities in the process and were really getting diminishing returns on that investment,” she said.
“If city residents don’t have a choice but to drive everywhere then our cities don’t stand a chance of surviving in this century. So we really do need to provide new choices for people to get around. We need to face the fact that the way our streets are designed has, in the past, made the decision for its residents.” . . .
. . . Such a revolution was, inevitably, not without controversy. All sorts of local lobby groups battled plans for separated cycle lanes, most famously over one eventually built outside Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, a route once described as “the most controversial slab of cement outside the Gaza Strip”.
Don’t forget that Ms. Sadik-Khan will be speaking in Vancouver on March 22, 7pm at the Playhouse.
Loss of street parking on arterials is inevitable one way or another. Either we’ll continue the mid 20th century approach of only providing for trips by automobile, in which case we’ll need to take the parking lane to make another travel lane or we’ll repurpose that space for other modes, wider sidewalks and bike lanes.
Either way, parking on the streets of main shopping districts will be a thing of the past.
We still visit and cycle nearly annually in Toronto since my partner and I each have family there. I’ve been impressed by the cycling volumes now compared to 15 yrs. ago when we moved to Vancouver.
For instance, in warm seasons in Toronto, it’s actually a serious problem trying to find bike rack parking in the downtown core….by Dundas Square (or others may know as “Eaton Centre”.), financial district and up in the ritzier area along Bay St. near Bloor St. ..not far from the University, Royal Ontario Museum….and, ta dah, bike share stations. There’s lots of cyclists.
I lived, worked and cycled for transportation for 14 yrs. in Toronto.
I’m always intrigued how well Vancouver markets its cycling culture…..but Toronto core and midtown has now an impressive number of cyclists as choice transportation. There are times, one wonders if Toronto is just too busy/distracted by other urban issues, to even bother marketing its cycling growth over the past decade.
Being a cyclist in Toronto is more challenging because the car congestion and people is far greater than Vancouver. There are over 1 million people pouring in through Union Station /downtown core to work daily from the suburbs.
Sadly, we don’t put a value on street parking. If we did, our cities would be much different. I don’t know about most drivers, but I rarely expect to be able to park out front of the business I am going to, even in small towns. I find the easiest and quickest place to park and then walk.
Bloor Street in the section where the bike lanes will be installed is difficult – because there are no alternate parallel streets (either safer or not) where a bike lane could be installed.