journal features

slowly, Toronto is becoming cycle-ready

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2014.07.10

With the new contra-flow cycle lanes, the city is learning that cycling is a solution; no one tell the Mayors! I belong to a group that proposed and won such a lane on Dixon avenue in the Beaches Triangle. But there's a much-needed one on Simcoe Street downtown that's a real god-send if you're emerging from south of the tracks anywhere along that stretch of Front. If we keep this up, the city will be genuinely cycle-ready any decade now.

Meanwhile, we have a mayoral election coming up and the candidates are dividing themselves along their stance on cycling; one conservative each for (Socknaki), against (Tory), undecided (Stintz), and definitely-against (Ford). And one liberal who is pro cycling (Chow). It's funny to see how they attempt to score political points when transit issues of any kind take shape.

rand()m quote

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

—Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.