Everybody hates Adelaide Street’s new bike lane

The official opening of Adelaide Street’s new separated bike lane should have been a moment worth celebrating for Toronto’s two-wheeled commuters, who had waited almost three years for the project to wind its way from city hall’s drawing boards to downtown pavement. And yet, judging by the reaction in the media and elsewhere online, the only thing worse than no bike lane at all is a bike lane that isn’t perfect.

The controversy stems from the fact that the lane has no physical separation from the rest of the street—just the usual lines of white paint. Because of the wording of a June city council decision, everyone was expecting, at minimum, a row of flexible bollards to protect the new lane from Adelaide’s heavy auto traffic.

The reason the bollards have failed to materialize isn’t entirely clear. Stephen Buckley, the city’s transportation manager, has told the Star that, because the new lane is part of a pilot project, the city has some latitude to experiment with different lane configurations if it wants. In other words, there are no bollards because bureaucrats don’t want them there.

For obvious reasons, this hasn’t gone over well with bike advocates. Cycle Toronto is in full-on publicity mode and Now Magazine has taken up the cause. Meanwhile, at street level, every motorist incursion into the Adelaide bike lane is being documented by cell-phone-wielding cyclists, who have been posting their pictures on Twitter and eliciting the kind of collective outrage usually reserved for war crimes. Here’s a small sample.