I love High Park. It’s the second largest green space in the City of Toronto and right beside the Junction neighborhood. But there are some problems. Despite having a subway line on its northern boundary, we’ve gotten the built form along its edges all wrong.
There’s very little functioning retail. The densities and heights are not nearly high enough. The streets aren’t great walking streets. And we’ve even gone and created undignified bus stops like this one here.
On top of all this, we’re now doing this silly thing where police are ticketing cyclists for riding around the park with too much vigor and enthusiasm. I’m sure somebody called to complain and this is all reactionary politics, but an even bigger reaction has now been set off.
For those of you who haven’t been following or aren’t from Toronto, hundreds of cyclists took to the streets this week to peacefully protest what has been going on in High Park.
The Globe & Mail then followed it up with this important piece calling for an end to cars inside the park. The boundaries currently house about 5 km of roads and almost 600 parking spots.
Given all this, I figured now is probably a good time to revive one of Casey Neistat’s original YouTube videos called “bike lanes.” The story is that he gets a ticket for not riding in a bike lane. And so he films a video of himself only riding in bike lanes — even if there are obstacles in his way.
It’s an awesome video with nearly 30 million views. And I’m sure that many of you have felt like doing exactly what he does when faced with this same situation. I know I have.
BRANDON DONNELLY 
My friend u have it al wrong. The reason why they are issuing tickets in highpark is because bikers use inner highpark roads as a track and some are going 20 to 40km an hour and dont stop. I myslef was hit by a biker last year going about 30 who skipped the stop sign right at the cafe there. The biker went flying and i hurt my arm. Maybe do some research before slapping your opinion down like blogto with no regard for truths of the matter or even seeing if there is an otherside instead of group thinking. Its about speed and not stopping and danger to pedestrians which is very real. And im talking about bikers in bike suits and speed bike type bikers not the casual biker who is plodding casually along.
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