Welcome back to How a Bike Lane is Born, the investigative series where we try to understand, and then explain, how new bike infrastructure comes to be. From the earliest line on a map to the final flexpost, no stone will be left unturned.
Our first editions focused on the future Portland Street bikeways’ historical context, its community consultations, its first trip to City Hall for the Infrastructure and Environment Committee, and its dramatic appearance at City Council.
In this fifth edition of How a Bike Lane is Born, we head down to Dan Leckie Way to check out a tiny segment of our bikeway that has now been built.
Everything was progressing pretty smoothly for the Portland / Dan Leckie bikeway. It had easily passed at Infrastructure and Environment Committee, survived an attempted ambush at City Council, and was on track to be installed this summer.
But change can come quickly in a city evolving as fast as Toronto, and we learned in July that construction on the Portland half of our fair bikeway would be delayed until 2025. To be fair, the postponement is to accommodate the construction of the Ontario Line, which will see two stations built just a short walk away from Portland Street. And that means that by the time the Ontario Line opens, the neighbourhood will feature radically improved active transportation and transit accessibility, with a new, fully protected bikeway on Portland and new subway stations at King and Bathurst and Queen and Spadina.
But onto the construction that is taking place this summer. City of Toronto documentation reveals that three small projects have been completed in August that have gotten everything started.
(An excerpt from a City of Toronto pdf. Image: City of Toronto)
Just north of Lakeshore, we get our first glimpse of the Dan Leckie Way portion of the route. A short segment of bidirectional bike lanes has been built that will eventually continue northward toward the Puente de Luz.
(A short segment of bidirectional bike lanes has been built.)
(A short segment of bidirectional bike lanes has been built.)
The space, which only a month ago was a barren, useless slab of concrete, has now been transformed into a protected cycling route.
Here it is prior to its transformation:
(The useless slab of concrete. Image: Google Maps)
It certainly makes you wonder how many examples of little parcels of land there are around the city that could be used for far more practical purposes. Or perhaps as a reader of this series you already wonder about these kinds of things quite often.
Just south of there, we see that the aforementioned traffic island has indeed been demolished, presumably to create some more space for the bikeway.
(Left: Before demolition of the traffic island. Right: After. Left image: Google Maps)
Finally, at the north end of Dan Leckie, at the entry point to the pedestrian bridge, we see that the curb cut configurations have been altered. Perhaps the expanded curb cut on the right is to accommodate the new cycle tracks. Disclaimer: the author of this blog is not an engineer.
(Left: Before the recent alteration of the curb cuts. Right: After. Left image: Google Maps)
All of these inconspicuous but necessary changes to the street’s design highlight how many minor details there are behind a seemingly simple project. The birth of a bikeway, as we have learned thus far in this series, is about so much more than the lanes themselves.
And speaking of which, our next edition of How a Bike Lane is Born is set to be a bit of a doozy. We’ll start the article with a very special interview with some of the folks involved in the design of the project from the City of Toronto before delving into any new details or construction announced or completed in the meantime.
Stay tuned!
