Lawyer-cyclist group wants to turn Toronto's John St. into car-free cultural corridor
For a number of years now, Toronto's John St. has been the focus of optimistic city planning discussion. It plays host to a number of important cultural centres and has been referred to by the executive director of the Entertainment District BIA as "the central spine" of the Entertainment District. Considering that it directly connects the Art Gallery of Ontario, Grange Park and OCAD, the TIFF Bell Lightbox theatre, the Canadian Broadcast Centre headquarters, the Rogers Centre, and all sorts of nice restaurants and shops, it's hard to disagree with such an assessment.
This centrality is what prompted the city to begin staging a pedestrian revolution on John St. that first went into effect in 2014. For six spring and summer months, it was transformed into a walker-dominated area that featured extended patios, inviting Muskoka chairs, and shortened car space.
The success of that installation, which returned for the following two years' warm seasons, has resulted in an initiative to make permanent changes to the composition of John St. Under the current proposal, those changes would not include the installation of a bike lane, something that a group of lawyer-cyclists is not pleased about.
Rather than go ahead with widened sidewalks and leave a reduced space for cars to travel through, the legal quartet wants to eliminate car access on the street altogether and make it purely a bike/pedestrian space. One of them noted that, "We see how wonderful car-free downtowns are in Europe," he said. "There's no reason we can't do the same thing here."
They even went to the trouble of hiring a traffic consultant last year. Findings from that suggested 70 per cent of southbound traffic during the morning rush is made up of cyclists, while that number rises to 75 per cent during the northbound afternoon rush.
But the relevant political figures haven't been receptive to their cause. Area councillor Joe Cressy has said that bike lanes on the street wouldn't make sense because they would be rendered useless for the many pedestrian-only street closures the city would plan. Environment Minister Glen Murray recently received a written request from the group but commented that he "can't interfere with the ministry process."