On yer bike!

There can't be a major city anywhere in the world that has made as many bad decisions about transportation and transit as Toronto has.  The city's lovable* Mayor, Rob Ford, was elected in large measure on a pledge to "end the war on the automobile".  As anyone who's attempted to drive in the city in recent years can attest, if there ever was such a war, the automobile was the clear winner.  In the meantime, plans to enlarge the city's inadequate subway system move ahead at a snail's pace, to the point that the local media regularly compare Toronto's transit plans unfavourably with those of.....Los Angeles!

Many cities around the world have turned to the bicycle as a possible solution to traffic congestion.  Toronto has joined the trend, but this week we learn that its two major initiatives in this regard -- a rental bike scheme, and a huge bike parking station at City Hall -- are both foundering.  Can we get these guys some training wheels?

The bike rental scheme, known as "Bixi", is similar to the "Boris bikes" in London and other such enterprises in cities such as Paris, Sydney and Montreal.  It involves a series of bike racks around the downtown area, from which members of the public can rent bikes for short jaunts around the city.  Toronto is not an ideal cycling city: the weather is hostile for three or four months a year, there are streetcar tracks all over the place, and driving standards are abysmal.  However, Montreal, which has many of the same disadvantages as Toronto, and in addition is quite a bit hillier, has had a Bixi scheme running reasonably successfully for some time, so naturally Toronto, which can never stand to miss out on anything other Canadian cities have, had to try it out as well.

The private operators who have been running the scheme on behalf of the city indicated months ago that they were not prepared to throw good money after bad just to keep the initiative alive.  So the city, which guaranteed Bixi's loans in order to kickstart the scheme, has had to reconsider its options.  A report presented to city council  suggests there are three choices, all of them unpalatable (and costly for taxpayers, of course.  Well, after all, this is a public-private "joint venture", so what else can you expect?)

Two of the options involve the city taking over ownership of the program and trying to make a go of it, while the third would see the city throw in the towel and sell off the bikes and racks for whatever it can get.  That final option is the most cost-effective, and to judge from the comments from readers of the linked article, would have a lot of popular support.  But it would involve a serious loss of face, and in a city as insecure and needy as Toronto is, that may make it a non-starter.

Then there's the Giant City Hall Bike Rack, which was going to come complete with showers so that sweaty velocipedists could freshen up after their terrifying ride through downtown traffic.  (It was designed to have 350 bike parking spaces and only four showers -- how was that supposed to work?)

Mayor Ford is opposed to the whole scheme on the grounds that it would replace 24 revenue-producing parking spaces under City Hall, but that seems like the least of the possible objections.  Check out this piece from today's Toronto Star.  It turns out that the scheme was in fact quietly dropped in 2011,  after $650,000 had been spent on preliminary work, but nobody actually saw fit to tell the city's taxpayers. You've got to love this quote from one of the designers of the ill-fated scheme:

“The Ford brothers should actually look at the drawings,” says Andrew Frontini, a member of the architectural team who won a design competition for the square. 

The showers are made of concrete blocks and finished inside with the “most economical porcelain tile you can get but that you can still clean,” said Frontini. As well, the storage area for the bikes is basically a metal cage. 

“We had more expensive versions,” he says, but the final design was “certainly not a cathedral to cycling. It’s basic infrastructure.”


In which case, Andrew, how in the name of Sir Bradley Wiggins was it going to cost a total of $1.2 million to actually get the thing in place?

Mayor Ford is constantly banging on about the need to cut wasteful spending at City Hall.  He hasn't made much progress so far, but these two madcap bicycling boondoggles look like a good place to start.  Certainly a lot better than shutting down libraries, one of the soft targets Ford has tried to pick on in the past.   But the downtown bien pensants are unlikely to give up their bikes (or rather, the taxpayers' bikes) without a fight.


* Not.