Paris just announced plans to become a "100% cycling city." A follow-up to plan vélo 2015-2020, which saw a doubling of the city's bike lanes, plan vélo 2021-2026 includes 130 km of new bike lanes and 52 km of pandemic bike lanes that will now be made permanent.

In addition to cycling lanes, the plans include new bike parking, new transit integrations, and a bunch of other things that are meant to strengthen the overall ecosystem in the city. The total budget for this second plan is about €100 million, which will bring the total cycling investment over the last 10-11 years to about €250 million. This is a serious commitment to cycling.

It's also a good example of one of the things that we have been talking about on this blog. This pandemic forced us to rethink how we allocate urban space -- everything from outdoor restaurant patios to bike lanes. And as we can see here, many of the positive changes are not surprisingly starting to stick.

This is a great 30 minute talk by Horace Dediu that is structured around his 10 commandments of micromobility. If you can't see the embedded video above, click here. What I think that many of you will appreciate about the talk is that he focuses on smaller interventions. Think bike lanes over big hyperloop moonshoots. In his words, we're going to get to where we want to go not through hyperbole, but through humility. And micromobility is all about humility.

I'm also a big fan of his last commandment. It is titled: cities always win. Yup.

This week, Toronto City Council approved the largest ever one-year expansion of bike lanes in the city -- a total of 40 km. It passed 23 to 2. Here is a map of the approved routes:

The Bloor West extension is being accelerated. This will take the Bloor Bikeway out to Runnymede and High Park in the west (close to our Junction House project).

New expansions of the network in the core include Bloor Street East, University Avenue, Dundas Street East, and Danforth Avenue (which also happens to connect another one of our development sites on Dawes Road).

Bloor, University, and Dundas are expected to be among the first installations. The idea here is to have them mirror some of our subway lines and fill the mobility gap as many people shy away from transit in the short-term.

All of this wouldn't have happened without COVID-19, at least not this quickly. I'm certainly not happy about a pandemic, but as a car owner and fair-weather cyclist, I am happy about these new bikeways and I am happy that we were compelled into action.