October 08, 2008 16:10
Thanks for the profiling of the “Bloor bike brawl” (City, Oct. 2) in Yorkville. The city’s EAvasion here contrasts with larger EAs for both Jarvis and Roncesvalles.
Fifteen years ago, this wide part of Bloor was found to be the best place for an east-west bike route by Marshall Macklin Monaghan, an older consulting firm praised in court documents by the Bloor-Yorkville BIA. Somehow, neither the city nor this firm remembered this and, if the project goes ahead, we’ve got less room for bike lanes parallel to the subway.
Sure, bike lanes don’t always work, but we want to avoid the conflicts caused by having cyclists on sidewalks, like the one added to the rendering in your print image. Despite this being a public street, and being about the most logical place in Southern Ontario for a bike lane, thus far even much of the bike parking is being removed.
The council support for this project without bike lanes shows the city’s ad campaigns extolling bike use, and their claims to be fighting climate change and smog, to be quite false. This greenhouse century demands bike lanes here and now: the subway makes it easy, and it’s even easier since merchants agreed to remove on-street parking. Hamish Wilson
NUIT BLANK
I found your Nuit Blanche pull-out section (Oct. 2) a bit disappointing. Three pages? And no map? The key to getting around this night is planning. And with no map, it’s a bit difficult. Talk about phoning it in! Maybe next year? Brian Carr
EDITORS’ NOTE: We thank Brian Carr for his comments and suggestions; however, we’re compelled to point out that the Nuit Blanche pull-out guide was eight pages long.
CORRECTION
Last week in Love Bites, Sasha misspelled the name of sex therapist and educator Leonore Tiefer. EYE WEEKLY regrets the error.
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