On Monday of this past long weekend, I went for a quick bike ride over to the Beaches, up to Little India, and then back down to the St. Lawrence Market.
The ride along Lake Shore and through the Beaches is one of my favorites. Minus a few awkward twists and turns as you leave the East Bayfront, it’s generally smooth sailing. It feels a bit like a bike highway.
It took me about 24 minutes to get to the beach, which means I was traveling on average just over 20 km/h. If you lived in the Beaches and worked downtown, that would be a perfectly reasonable commute in my mind.
And it’s for reasons like this that Munich is looking to invest in a huge network of bike highways. They’re calling it a Radschnellverbindungen – which I might start ambitiously calling some of the bike paths in Toronto – and the idea is to connect the city with all of the suburbs.
Below is a map of the routes they’re looking at. The purple lines are “suitable routes” and the blue lines are corridors they’ve looked at it. If I’m wrong in my translation, blame Google.
They are still in the feasibility stage, but the idea is for each bike path to be 4 meters wide and have no cross streets or traffic lights – essential a highway for bikes.
And if you think this all sounds like a pipe dream, check out this video of the recently opened Cykelslangen (Cycle Snake) in Copenhagen.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iypvbe6J6Qs?rel=0]
Would you commute to work on your bike if you had a highway, just like cars do?
This morning I got up at 7:30am and met a good friend of mine at the St. Lawrence Market for breakfast.
Market Street is closed to cars today so it’s pedestrian-only. It should be this way all the time. They had a pig roasting on a spit when I walked by and a big stage set up.
Below is a photo of what it looks like. Keep in mind that this photo was taken just after 8:00am, which is why it’s not all that busy, yet.
Yesterday I wrote about urban-suburban divides within cities. And I argued that built form will largely dictate the kinds of transportation choices that people will ultimately make.
As a follow-up to that, here is a chart based on the findings of a research report completed by Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy way back in 1989. On the x-axis is urban density (i.e. built form) and on the y-axis is per capita transport related energy consumption.
On Monday of this past long weekend, I went for a quick bike ride over to the Beaches, up to Little India, and then back down to the St. Lawrence Market.
The ride along Lake Shore and through the Beaches is one of my favorites. Minus a few awkward twists and turns as you leave the East Bayfront, it’s generally smooth sailing. It feels a bit like a bike highway.
It took me about 24 minutes to get to the beach, which means I was traveling on average just over 20 km/h. If you lived in the Beaches and worked downtown, that would be a perfectly reasonable commute in my mind.
And it’s for reasons like this that Munich is looking to invest in a huge network of bike highways. They’re calling it a Radschnellverbindungen – which I might start ambitiously calling some of the bike paths in Toronto – and the idea is to connect the city with all of the suburbs.
Below is a map of the routes they’re looking at. The purple lines are “suitable routes” and the blue lines are corridors they’ve looked at it. If I’m wrong in my translation, blame Google.
They are still in the feasibility stage, but the idea is for each bike path to be 4 meters wide and have no cross streets or traffic lights – essential a highway for bikes.
And if you think this all sounds like a pipe dream, check out this video of the recently opened Cykelslangen (Cycle Snake) in Copenhagen.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iypvbe6J6Qs?rel=0]
Would you commute to work on your bike if you had a highway, just like cars do?
This morning I got up at 7:30am and met a good friend of mine at the St. Lawrence Market for breakfast.
Market Street is closed to cars today so it’s pedestrian-only. It should be this way all the time. They had a pig roasting on a spit when I walked by and a big stage set up.
Below is a photo of what it looks like. Keep in mind that this photo was taken just after 8:00am, which is why it’s not all that busy, yet.
Yesterday I wrote about urban-suburban divides within cities. And I argued that built form will largely dictate the kinds of transportation choices that people will ultimately make.
As a follow-up to that, here is a chart based on the findings of a research report completed by Peter Newman and Jeffrey Kenworthy way back in 1989. On the x-axis is urban density (i.e. built form) and on the y-axis is per capita transport related energy consumption.
When Market Street was redone a few years ago, the original vision for the street was for it to be pedestrian-only. But somebody told me that the city didn’t want that. Too bad. It strikes me as a perfect candidate for that.
After breakfast, we then biked out to the Scarborough Bluffs in the east end of the city. If you click here, you can see the path we took via Strava. It’s only about 15km from downtown. The ride through the Beaches was by far the best stretch. The water was on my right hand side. The pavement was smooth and continuous. And I had George FitzGerald on my headphones for pacing.
When we got there, this was the view we were presented with:
It honestly doesn’t feel like Toronto. The water is turquoise and there’s a beautiful beach at the bottom of the cliffs. It felt like paradise.
If you’ve never been to the Scarborough Bluffs, do yourself a favor and get out there on a beautiful summer day. It’s the dog days of summer and Toronto is a magical place right now.
What this chart shows is that as cities become more dense, “automobile dependence” is reduced in favor of, other, more sustainable forms of transport.
Here we have Houston at the top left (meaning it has the highest transport-related energy consumption per capita) and Hong Kong all the way on the bottom right. Hong Kong has by far the highest density among the cities looked at in this study, but Moscow seems to have the lowest per capita energy consumption. Still, the trend appears clear.
Some people think of “density” as a dirty word. But there are lots of benefits to dense urban centers. And density does not necessarily have to mean tall buildings.
When Market Street was redone a few years ago, the original vision for the street was for it to be pedestrian-only. But somebody told me that the city didn’t want that. Too bad. It strikes me as a perfect candidate for that.
After breakfast, we then biked out to the Scarborough Bluffs in the east end of the city. If you click here, you can see the path we took via Strava. It’s only about 15km from downtown. The ride through the Beaches was by far the best stretch. The water was on my right hand side. The pavement was smooth and continuous. And I had George FitzGerald on my headphones for pacing.
When we got there, this was the view we were presented with:
It honestly doesn’t feel like Toronto. The water is turquoise and there’s a beautiful beach at the bottom of the cliffs. It felt like paradise.
If you’ve never been to the Scarborough Bluffs, do yourself a favor and get out there on a beautiful summer day. It’s the dog days of summer and Toronto is a magical place right now.
What this chart shows is that as cities become more dense, “automobile dependence” is reduced in favor of, other, more sustainable forms of transport.
Here we have Houston at the top left (meaning it has the highest transport-related energy consumption per capita) and Hong Kong all the way on the bottom right. Hong Kong has by far the highest density among the cities looked at in this study, but Moscow seems to have the lowest per capita energy consumption. Still, the trend appears clear.
Some people think of “density” as a dirty word. But there are lots of benefits to dense urban centers. And density does not necessarily have to mean tall buildings.
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