On Tuesday morning, Toronto public works committee chair Jaye Robinson stood on Gerrard St. E. and announced the city would soon temporarily shut down a big stretch of that downtown thoroughfare.

“Our infrastructure is the backbone of our city’s prosperity, and we are investing to maintain and improve it,” she said when explaining why Gerrard between Yonge and Sherbourne Sts. would be closed for construction for an entire year — alongside other temporary road closures on Bayview Ave., Lake Shore Blvd., Markham Rd. and more than a dozen other major arteries. It will be a “tough summer,” she said, but noted that “this work is important.”

Which is kind of funny, in a way. Because only 24 hours earlier, Robinson’s committee had made a complete hash of considering a proposal to implement a year-long pilot project that would install bike lanes on a long stretch of Bloor St. W.

There, Robinson and some of her colleagues seemed less concerned about improving the transportation infrastructure backbone of the city, and more concerned about the possible traffic impact from a possibly temporary reduction in the number of car lanes on Bloor.

She was saying there was not enough information to make a decision about whether a temporary pilot project would be disastrous on such a major “arterial road” as Bloor.

These particular bike lanes have been talked about for decades and were the subject of an environmental assessment approved by city council in 2013, community consultation meetings in October and December 2015 and March 2016, and an online survey with 2,100 respondents that concluded in January 2016. They were also included in the 10-year cycling plan update last year, and a preliminary feasibility study this year that considered various design options. All this is detailed in the staff report Robinson’s committee was debating.

But put all that background aside for a moment.

Now, here’s the thing: The Bloor bike lane proposal is for a pilot project that would allow the city to observe the plan in action for a year, while gathering data about its effects on traffic flow, transportation choices, safety changes and other things. Such a pilot project is the opportunity to gather the kind of information that Robinson says is lacking. Implementing it is probably a prerequisite for gathering reliable information of that kind.

And now here’s the other thing: As Robinson’s press conference on Tuesday reminds us, we routinely close roads and lanes of roads and make other changes in this city for construction.

I don’t know if the bright lights at city hall gave been smart enough to gather data about traffic and safety effects from various road and lane closures. But I do know that during those closures, the business of the city does not grind to a halt. Sometimes traffic sucks a bit more than usual, sometimes we barely notice. But the whole process is routine enough that Robinson refers to widespread major road closures as a reliable feature of the calendar, “construction season,” she called it. An “investment,” she says, to “improve” the city.

But eliminating some parking spots and reconfiguring lane allocations for a year to see if creating a new major bike thoroughfare across the city would be as big a benefit as some claim? Well, just imagine what could happen! How could we even chance it?

To directly address the argument I know many are thinking: The point here is not that the Bloor bike lane, which we hope will make transportation work better, and construction, which we pretty much know will make it work better, are exactly the same.

It’s that we know from construction that closes roads what the worst possible outcome of a road change would be, and it’s not that bad. It’s routine. The best possible outcome would be massive improvement on routine. A pilot project would let us know where on that spectrum this project falls.

It’s kind of fitting, in a way, that the works committee’s deadlock on the issue of the bike lane pilot project — it will come to council next week without any official position from the committee — happened while former New York transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan was in town.

Sadik-Khan has become a bit of a global guru on making city streets friendlier to pedestrians and cyclists, one who managed to make car traffic move better in New York while also cutting accidents and famously transforming the once traffic-clogged city into a walking and cycling paradise.

Shortly after Robinson announced her road closures, Sadik-Khan was addressing the board of trade, where, according to the live twitter reporting of Councillor Shelley Carroll, she outlined her experience: “Lesson #1: paint the city you want to see. Pilots!”

Sadik-Khan has outlined in her new book Street Fight — as I’ve written before — the necessity of pilot projects to test ideas, demonstrate them to the public, and gather data. (And she and then-mayor Michael Bloomberg were serious about data: They tracked traffic flow and travel-time changes using comprehensive real-time GPS information from the city’s cabs.)

Of course, in her book, Sadik-Khan also outlines how some politicians fought her every step of the way about implementing bike lanes, terrified some motorist might be inconvenienced. In episode after episode, she recounts how councillors in New York said her proposals amounted to “making it impossible to drive,” or would “make it difficult to park,” or said “forcing the same volume of cars and trucks into fewer and narrower traffic lanes, the potential for accidents … goes up,” or insisted bike lanes should be put off-road, in parks and trails, or simply demanded more study, more consultation, more evidence.

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Her pilot projects supplied the evidence: fewer accidents, smoother, better moving traffic, more bike riders.

They never would have known unless they tried. Let’s hope city council agrees to try a pilot project here, too. At worst, it’ll be like another minor inconvenience of construction season. At best, it will, as Robinson says, strengthen “the backbone of our city’s prosperity.”