OPINION: Cars vs. Bicycles
Posted April 13, 2010 12:00 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Courtesy TheMarkNews.com
Always simmering just below the surface in Toronto, the seemingly intractable conflict between drivers and cyclists occasionally bursts into the open. It may be the tragic death of a bicycle rider in a traffic accident involving a car, the surreptitious, practically overnight replacement of a traffic lane for cars with a bike lane, or a particularly nasty debate at city council about funding for a cycling program – and suddenly, the newspapers, talk shows, and blogs are overflowing with anger, invective, and apparently irreconcilable debate.
The latest episode seems to have been triggered by city council’s proposal to remove a traffic lane along Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue to create a dedicated bike lane on a key east-west thoroughfare that is also a vibrant neighbourhood commercial strip. This follows by only a few months the previous divisive issue of adding bike lanes to Jarvis Street to provide additional north-south capacity to the bike-path system.
The overriding question that hovers over this debate is: can these two modes of transportation ever coexist?
It is a fundamental principle of city planning that the distribution system – the way in which we move through solid pieces of built form – is the key to spatial organization. This so-called “negative space” is actually the web, the thread that ties the static, functional parts of our urban environments together and allows us to carry out the many activities that define the rhythm of our lives. Furthermore, the effectiveness of this distribution system defines how well the city functions and sets the limits of how far and how big urban development can practically get.
Movement through this system, however, is not a well-planned or predictable process, but rather the sum of an enormous number of individual decisions made by people with their own agendas and priorities, as well as a wide range of capabilities. The system, with its own rudimentary set of written laws and unwritten rules, must somehow accommodate all of these parameters and sort out who gets priority and how these priorities are dealt with in a seemingly infinite set of encounters.
The intricacies of this system are clearly articulated in an intriguing book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt. A wide-ranging book, it spends a fair amount of print discussing the interaction between cars and bikes, and while its primary focus is on automobiles, the discussion highlights some of the key sources of the car/bike conflict, particularly in the North American arena.
These sources of conflict include the obvious differences in the relative sizes of the two modes of transport, including the fact that cars will inevitably come out on top of any direct contact between the two and the relative speeds at which the vehicles can travel. This latter parameter would also seem to favour the car, except that in heavy urban traffic situations, the bicycle can often cover the same distance in far less time.
However, there are also differences between the people who use these modes of transport, emotionally and psychologically. The bike rider feels far more vulnerable and exposed as a result of the factors noted above, but Vanderbilt also notes that drivers often feel dissociated from the outside world as they travel inside their metal cocoons. Just as often, bike riders feel – and overtly express – a sense of self-righteousness, while drivers express a sense of entitlement that leads to conflicts. This may result from direct confrontations (you don’t have to remind Michael Bryant of this) or the difficulty of direct communication in the course of the daily ride.
There is also the seemingly intractable feeling on both sides of the debate that this is a zero-sum game – that the only way one side can win is for the other side to lose, which is a state of mind sure to breed dissatisfaction with any outcome. Finally, both bikers and drivers carry multiple agendas and are not all on the same wavelength, figuratively or literally. They may be commuters going to or from work, out to do any of a myriad of chores, errands and tasks, or just out casually or for recreation.
The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that the laws governing both the operating of these modes of transport and their interaction with each other appear to be, at best, open to interpretation, and at worst, confusing – leading to potentially dangerous conflicts that often end up being resolved in a fraction of a second, for better or for worse.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am an avid recreational and occasional commuting biker but also use my car to get around the city on a regular basis. To me, the questions that Toronto must face in seeking resolution of the inherent conflicts between bicycles and automobiles sound like the ones parents struggle with when bringing up their children:
Can bikes and cars learn to co-exist or do they need to be separated?
Will the solutions we set up for them be adequate to keep them safe, or will they find their own solutions, possibly outside of the framework that we have worked so hard to establish?
And as both bikes and cars evolve, will they be able to both reach their full potential to contribute to society?
The question that the Jarvis Street and Bloor-Danforth debates have to answer is whether bikers will in fact use the designated bike lanes on these streets or – in response to real or perceived dangers on these official routes – take the alternative routes, both formal and informal, already in use through our neighbourhoods, where directional signals, traffic lights, stop signs and other traffic signals can be ignored without peril and with considerable time saved as a result.
And as we mature as a society, as we put into place an improved transit system (provincial and federal budgets permitting), and as we come to grips with more sustainable personal modes of transportation, will we be able to reach a détente among ourselves as we pedal, drive, run, walk, or otherwise propel ourselves around the distribution networks that define our cities and in turn define us? Stay tuned – the answer could be interesting.
The Mark News is Canada’s online forum for opinion and analysis.
