To the casual observer, it looks like more convoluted maneuvering at City Hall: a report discussing an upcoming report, examined by a committee of politicians, selected from a larger group of politicians, to be analyzed, and, eventually, voted on at some later date.

To cycling advocates, it’s a step toward a key piece of infrastructure that’s been the subject of debate and analysis for decades.

Posted on the city’s website is an update report on Toronto’s “Ten Year Cycling Network Plan.” Scroll down to the second appendix, and there it is, under the heading “2016 Implementation Program Locations.”

“Bloor St. W. (Pilot Project) ... Shaw St. to Avenue Rd.”

The city plans to conduct a public consultation meeting on the project this fall, moving slowly toward the dream of Toronto cycling advocates: a Bloor Street bike lane — and not just a fragment, like the section between Broadview and Sherbourne, but a long corridor forming the backbone of a connected cycling network.

It’s an idea that’s been 40 years in the making.

“It could form the spine,” said Albert Koehl, a founding member of the group Bells on Bloor. “Because it’s such an ideal east-west route: it’s straight, it’s flat, it goes from one side of the city to the other.”

For consultants, the long-standing idea of a Bloor bike lane has been a profitable one, with the cost of various studies piling up over the years.

It was in November 1976 that “the Commissioner of Public Works recommended that consultants be retained to study possible locations for new bike routes,” according to city records.

The city set aside $40,000 for the analysis, and the consulting firm Barton-Aschman Ltd. began work in August 1977.

In a paper published that December — one of six Barton-Aschman wrote — the consultants recommended Harbord, Hoskin and Wellesley streets as the location for an east-west spinal route.

Bloor, they suggested, should be maintained as an arterial road, making an argument that’s still common today.

But the idea of a Bloor bike lane surfaced again after consultants Marshall Macklin Monaghan were retained in October 1990 to study bike lanes. In a 1992 report, MMM broke proposed route installations into three phases. Phase one routes should be installed immediately; phase three routes required “additional analysis or significant physical and operational changes” before eventual installation.

The consultants designated Bloor Street between Sherbourne and Spadina as a phase one route, to be installed by June 1992. They classified Bloor St. and the Danforth, “from city limit to city limit,” as a phase three route, recommending it be installed by 1993, pending further study.

Since then, a Bloor bike lane has remained a perennial idea at City Hall, with advocates maintaining pressure for a lane in recent years.

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“It’s a big step forward, and it’s about time,” Angela Bischoff said about the pilot project.

A member of Bells on Bloor’s organizing team, Bischoff was married to the late activist Tooker Gomberg, memorialized in “Take the Tooker” group rides and advocacy calling for bike lanes on Bloor-Danforth.

Gomberg didn’t advocate specifically for Bloor-Danforth bike lanes, but Bischoff sees the group’s advocacy as a fitting tribute.

“Since his passing there have been so many projects that he spawned that have since come to fruition,” Bischoff said. “I wish he was around to see the legacy of his life.”

That legacy includes the creation of the Tooker Gomberg Memorial Library through the Centre for Social Innovation which made more than 800 of his personal books available to the public and his efforts in 1999 to bring together a critical mass of GTA homeowners to purchase solar panels in bulk, an idea that came to fruition in 2006.

The struggle over the Bloor bike lanes continued throughout the summer of 2010 when the city retained a group of consultants to begin the Bloor-Danforth Bikeway Environmental Assessment Study, covering the stretch from east of Kipling Ave. to Kingston Rd. In July 2011, council ordered staff to kill the EA, and the consultant contract was terminated.

In November 2013, council voted to conduct an environmental assessment on Bloor St. alongside analysis of Dupont. The work was expected to cost $450,000.

In February 2015, citing “other priorities for bikeway network development,” city staff said in a memo that they had not begun the Bloor-Dupont analysis.

Today, “the conversation around cycling in general has changed,” said Jacquelyn Hayward Gulati, the city’s manager of cycling infrastructure and programs, “It’s more accepted and we see more and more cyclists on the streets.”

Staff will report back to the public works committee early next year on the Bloor pilot project, Gulati said. The update presented to PWIC also suggests that the city study Bloor and Dupont “between Keele Street and Sherbourne Street.”

If things go smoothly, the pilot lanes could be installed by spring 2016.

If things go smoothly.