Egnaro TV

When North American cyclists go looking for a place to call mecca, they often turn to Amsterdam. It's easy to see why. On the train from Schiphol airport to Amsterdam Centraal you already see the signs of cycling. Bike lanes on every road, people of all ages and genders on their old bikes zooming around everywhere. One of the first sights you see when exiting the train station is the multi-level bike parking facilities with what must be thousands of bikes on it. Those bikes spill out of the official parking and onto every railing and post in sight.

Walking away from the station you quickly find yourself crossing roadways consisting of car, tram and bike lanes, each usually separated by it's own median. Intersections have bike signals in addition to the usual lights. Deeper into the downtown core the cars come alone the roadways at pretty spares intervals and instead you spend most of your time dodging bikes instead.

As a Toronto bike commuter I felt like I'd discovered heaven my first time in Amsterdam. While I'd like to think this would all be possible in Toronto some day, I really doubt it will ever happen. Amsterdam is what it is because of it's old foundations, the canals and narrow streets have made it an easily sell to promote cycling as the best way to get around. The mild winter weather definitely helps too.

If you really want to look somewhere for a cycling infrastructure that Toronto could truly model itself after, I'd say go to Rotterdam. It's an hour train ride southwest of Amsterdam and is really a completely different city. Having been almost completely destroyed during the war, Rotterdam is a now a very modern city, full of new, stunning architecture and intelligent urban planning.  It's common here to find six lane roads, much like those in suburban Toronto, but down the center often runs a light rail line and on the outsides are wide bike lanes separated from the rest of the road.

Rotterdam is obviously a city that clearly thought about the bike as an important part of urban transport and as incorporated the necessary infrastructure where ever possible. I could see Toronto being this way. In many ways Rotterdam feels like Toronto with it's modern shopping malls, diverse population and mix of industrial past and modern financial centres.

This photo shows the clear separation of a major bike line next to a major roadway. Even cooler is the way the median has been re-purposed here. A huge skate park sits on it, keeping the skaters away from anyone who might be annoyed by them. And underneath this is a nightclub, where the ground muffles the beats late into the night. Such great usage of this space.

I never really saw it before, but the more I consider how Toronto could be transformed into a hub of cycling activity the more I realize just how much our weather will always make this nearly impossible. At least until global warming heats things up enough that we no longer get snow. Trying to imagine a snow plow clear the streets of Rotterdam is scary. You'd need different machines to clear each type of lane, all working together to move the snow all the way to the sidewalk. It would be painful at best. Or even, as much as I love the old (and new) cobblestone sidewalks and roadways, can you imagine trying to clear these with a sand shovel?

Maybe turning the Gardiner Expressway into an enclosed bike and pedestrian route isn't such a crazy idea afterall.