Bradford would move the bike network to ravines and quiet streets. Toronto already has that network.

More than 75% of Toronto’s streets are already low-stress

The network he proposes to build largely exists.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have measured Toronto’s streets on the standard four-point scale of traffic stress, where the lowest two levels cover quiet residential streets and separated paths. Lin, Chan and Saxe, writing in Findings in February 2021, reported the result:

Although over 75% of the network consisted of LTS1/2 links, they were largely bounded by stressful arterials of LTS3/4, limiting low-stress cycling access.

Toronto has never had a shortage of quiet streets. It has a shortage of quiet streets that connect to each other. The arterials in between cut the calm parts of the city into pockets, and a rider who will not cross an arterial is confined to whichever pocket they started in.

The same study measured what happened when Toronto added bikeways, including on major streets, during the pandemic. Low-stress access to jobs rose 22.3% and to population 10.4%, with the largest gains where new infrastructure connected to what already existed.

The ravine trails are worth building, and Toronto has built some

His proposal is popular and the City’s own research says so. Asked what would improve cycling for convenience, Torontonians ranked more off-street paths and trails first, with 65% of utilitarian cyclists and 60% of recreational cyclists saying it would help. Trails and multi-use paths also draw the highest comfort ratings of any facility type, at 58% comfortable and another 25% somewhat comfortable.

The corridors are real too. The Meadoway is converting 16 kilometres of the Gatineau hydro corridor across Scarborough, with roughly 10 kilometres already rideable. The Finch Hydro Corridor carries an existing recreational trail with a 15-kilometre greenway planned along it.

Building more of this is a good idea. Nothing in the research argues against ravine and hydro-corridor trails. What the research addresses is the substitution: his cards pair “building more safe cycling routes” with “removing Bloor West bike lanes,” and it is the second half that the evidence lands on.

On a low-stress-only network, most of the city reaches fewer than 5,000 jobs

Faghih Imani, Miller and Saxe, in the Journal of Transport Geography in 2019, calculated how many destinations a Toronto rider can actually reach at each level of traffic stress. Across most of the city, a rider on the low-stress network reaches fewer than 5,000 jobs. Only at the third level of stress, where riders are “required to negotiate with vehicles and may be in proximity of high speed traffic,” does reachable employment climb above 15,000 jobs for a sizeable part of Toronto.

The distance between those two figures is the arterial network. Jobs, shops, schools and clinics sit on main streets because that is where cities put them.

This pattern was documented well before Toronto measured it. The foundational study, by Mekuria, Furth and Nixon for the Mineta Transportation Institute, put it plainly:

in spite of the existence of a large mass of low-stress links, it is often impossible to get “from here to there” without being forced to use higher-stress links … the city is composed of many “islands of low-stress connectivity”

That study names the barriers that create the islands. The first category is “natural and man-made barriers that require grade-separated crossings such as freeways, railroads, and creeks, whose crossings tend to be widely spaced.” Ravines and rail corridors appear in the proposal as the backbone. In the literature they are the obstacle, because a corridor is only as useful as the number of places you can get on and off it.

Commuters accept less detour than recreational riders

The premise underneath the plan is that riders can be routed around main streets without losing much. Route-choice research measures how much detour riders will actually take, and the answer inverts the assumption.

A study of non-recreational cyclists in Vancouver found 75% of trips were within 10% of the shortest possible distance, and 90% within 25%, figures the researchers noted were nearly identical to car trips. In Portland, Broach, Gliebe and Dill found commuting cyclists would add 16% to a trip for a bike path and 11% for a quiet-street route. For non-commuting cyclists the same numbers were 26% and 18%.

People riding for pleasure will go the long way. People riding to work, to school, or to pick up a child will not. A network routed through ravines and back streets is therefore best matched to the trips the proposal treats as incidental, and worst matched to the trips that are growing.

Every year of growth in Toronto cycling has been utilitarian

The City’s own survey work, carried out by Nanos across three studies:

Share of residents	1999	2009	2019
Utilitarian cyclists (work, school, shopping, visiting)		29%	44%
Recreational only (recreation or fitness)	28%	25%	26%

Recreation-only cycling has not moved in twenty years. Utilitarian cycling grew by half in a decade. Riding a bike in Toronto has become a way of getting places, and the growth is entirely in the segment a ravine network serves least well.

The same survey found Torontonians are twice as likely to feel comfortable on a major road with a bike lane than on one without, and that the “interested but concerned” group, the people not yet riding, are nearly four times more likely to be comfortable on a major road with a cycle track than without one.

Year-round clearing is already the standard, and park paths are the exception

The post promises a network “maintained year-round.” From the City’s Winter Cycling page:

All types of cycling infrastructure are cleared when two centimeters of snow accumulates.

Toronto’s winter operation already covers roughly 956 kilometres of separated bike lanes and multi-use trails, plowed with dedicated equipment. That part of the promise describes the existing service standard.

The exception runs the wrong way for the proposal. The same page states that the City maintains trails and pathways in more than 250 parks, and that “the City cannot maintain all pathways in all parks during the winter, due to local and environmental conditions.” The surfaces the plan would move the network onto are the ones the City says it cannot always clear.

What he says about the research

Standing on Bloor Street West on 12 August, Bradford addressed this directly:

Now I know that there are studies out there that say lanes like these work. I’ve read them. […] take a closer look, it becomes apparent that they are largely based around the most optimistic potential scenarios.

That is a fair description of some forecasting work, and it is worth separating from what is cited here. None of the three studies above projects a benefit. They measure an existing network: how many of its links are low-stress, how those links connect, and how many jobs a rider can reach on them. The Toronto accessibility figures are counts of what the city was in the year it was measured.

He is right that the ravines are an underused asset and that the plans have sat too long. The part left out is that the quiet-street network already exists, that arterials are what break it, and that the trips Toronto has gained are the ones least willing to go around.

What this article does not rate

The 12 August video contains several further claims we have not assessed here, including a comparison of vehicle and bicycle counts on the corridor, the description of Toronto’s ravine system as the largest in the world, and the statement that the trail plans have never been acted on. His claim that Bloor West businesses saw sales fall is rated separately as Unsubstantiated.