The first package of bike lane proposals for 2008 is up for approval at the meeting of the City of Toronto's Public Works and Infrastructure Committee (PWIC) this week on Wednesday May 7th, 2008 PWIC Meeting 15 Agenda. The report, 2008 Bikeway Network Program - Phase 1 Installation of Bicycle Lanes, contains proposals for 3 bicycle lanes that total 4.2 km to be built in 4 city wards. The report indicates that the 4 Councillors from these wards, Joe Pantelone Ward 19 Trinity-Spadina, Joe Mihevc Ward 21 St. Paul's, Kyle Rae Ward 27 Toronto Centre-Rosedale and Pam McConnell Ward 28 Toronto Centre-Rosedale are in support of these projects so there should be no hurdles left in getting these new bike lanes approved.

This image of the Toronto Bicycle Map has been edited to show the proposed bicycle lanes in Phase 1 of the 2008 bike lane program. The new lanes are shown with solid orange lines. Red lines are existing bicycle lanes, blue lines are signed on-street bicycle routes and green lines are off street paths. (Click the map image to see a larger version.)

These are the first bike lanes to be approved under a new process for Streamlining the Bicycle Lane Approval Process that the Chair of the Toronto Cycling Advisory Committee Councillor A. A. (Adrian) Heaps Ward 35 Scarborough Southwest proposed and which was adopted by City Council in January of 2008. Under the old process these three projects would have to go forward as three individual reports to the Toronto and East York Community Council possibly at different meeting dates requiring staff to go and be present each time one of these projects is on the Community Council Agenda. There are 4 Community Councils and in the past each would have the bicycle lane proposals for their area referred to them for final approval. If a bicycle lane project straddled the border of 2 Community Councils it would then have to be approved at a meeting of the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee and then go on to Council. This reporting process has now been simplified and all reports will go to the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee for approval and then on to City Council for final approval. This new process is a great step forward for the Bike Plan and is a necessary measure if the goal of completing the Bikeway Network by 2012 is to be achieved as promised by Mayor David Miller.

At a meeting with cycling community groups on April 21, 2008 Councillor Heaps repeated his promise that 50 km of bicycle lanes would be built and he outlined his strategy for ensuring that gets done. The first step was getting the approval process in place, the second was getting Councillors on side for projects in their ward. Councillor Heaps has been working behind the scenes for the past months to get a list of projects together that can be approved before City Council recesses for the summer. The 50 km of projects for 2008 has been divided into 3 phases. The next two phases should come to the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee at its next two meetings on June 4th and June 27th, 2008.

This should be an exciting year for cyclists in Toronto as it looks like the building of the on-street portion of the Bikeway Network is back in gear.