LILLEY: If food delivery riders leave Toronto’s bike lanes, who will use them?
· Toronto Sun
A new ad campaign by the City of Toronto is warning e-bike riders not to use the city’s bike lanes.
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My question is, if the e-bike riders delivering food orders for Uber Eats, DoorDash and SkipTheDishes aren’t using the city’s bike lanes, then who will?
Across much of the city, even in the core where cyclists are supposedly concentrated, the most common sight in a bike lane isn’t someone commuting to school or work; it’s someone on an e-bike carrying a bag of food.
Toronto has spent more than $100 million installing bike lanes across the city over the last decade. The end result is that the city is subsidizing food delivery service companies because those are the biggest users of these lanes.
Don’t get me wrong, I like my food delivery showing up quickly as much as the next guy, but after spending a small fortune installing bike lanes primarily used by these services, the city is now telling them to ride on the road with the cars.
“Heavy ride, move aside. Don’t use bike lanes,” the city campaign says.
According to the city’s rules, any bike over 40 kg shouldn’t be in the city’s bike lanes; it should be on the roads with the cars. If I thought for a moment that the riders of these bikes might follow the rules of the road, maybe I would get behind this push, but they don’t.
They don’t pay attention to what other vehicles are doing, they often ride on the sidewalk, they ride against traffic, or they ignore the rules of the road.
Now the city is telling them to stay out of the bike lanes.
The reality on Toronto’s streets
This isn’t a theoretical issue for me. I live in the core, the area where cyclists are supposed to be plentiful and, most of the time, are not. On Thursday, travelling from St. Clair to south of Bloor, most of which is protected bike-lane territory, I saw many food delivery drivers but just two cyclists.
You might respond that Thursday was hot or that the smoke from the wildfires was keeping cyclists off the road. Well, the same could be said of much of our winter, and yet we still keep investing in this infrastructure in all the wrong places.
I’m not against bike lanes, I’m just against bad plans for bike lanes, which is what we have.
Bradford says e-bikes need different rules
City Councillor Brad Bradford, who is also running for mayor against Olivia Chow, says we need to deal with these e-bikes in a different way. He says a pair of pedals welded to a motorcycle-shaped frame does not make a bicycle.
“Every week we all see them: mini motorcycles ripping through bike lanes, riding up on the sidewalks, interfering with pedestrians, or parked in the hallway of your apartment where the batteries have a tendency to catch fire,” Bradford said recently.
“It’s not working. Whether you are crossing the street, riding your bike, or stuck in your vehicle, the behaviour of some of these mini motorcycles is reckless. It is putting you at risk.”
Pushing riders into traffic isn’t the answer
Back in May, he pushed for a motion for these types of e-bikes to be insured and regulated by the province. Consultations on that front continue, but something must be done.
Is the answer to take them out of the city’s 346 km of bike lanes?
That doesn’t seem like the answer. We have built an infrastructure that is primarily used by these food delivery riders. We need to find a way to regulate these vehicles, but pushing them into the same lane as cars is not the answer.