The streets of Toronto are full of traffic. This we know. You can’t fit anymore cars in. It has been the case for some time.

So if I had told you in 2014, while John Tory was making traffic congestion the centrepiece of his mayoral campaign, that there was an easy way to quickly and cheaply move an additional 6,000 vehicles into the downtown core each day without slowing traffic any further, you might have suspected I was under the influence of bad drugs.

And yet that’s exactly what was accomplished with the temporary, “pilot project” installation of the Richmond-Adelaide bicycle lanes. A report released this week recommends making those lanes permanent infrastructure, and tells a commuting story of roaring success that was accomplished with little fanfare and even less cost.

Credit where it is due: Rob Ford’s term as mayor is remembered for its all-out war on bike lanes, and especially for the removal of the ones on Jarvis St., but it was under him that the lanes on Richmond and Adelaide were installed in 2014.

At the time, about 730 people cycled on the two streets combined each day, and there were questions (as there always are) about demand in a city where it’s cold much of the year. Could you really justify giving a whole lane to the use of those 730 cyclists? But as former Vancouver planner Brent Toderian is fond of saying, you cannot justify a bridge by counting the number of people who currently swim across the river. And so it seems to have been with these bike lanes, which attracted 10 times as many cyclists — 7,509 a day — in 2018.

The city also monitored bike traffic on nearby streets to see if the change was a result of people taking the new lanes instead of travelling on King or Queen Sts. It found the decreases in cycle traffic on those roads was minimal, “suggesting that 94 per cent of the growth in the number of cyclists on Richmond-Adelaide was as a result of new cyclists, shifting their transportation choice from another mode.”

In the downtown core area, the bike lanes now carry almost a third of the vehicles travelling the road during the peak of rush hour, “a higher volume of vehicles per lane than the motor vehicle lanes.”

And what about those motor vehicle lanes? To make room for the separated cycle path, the number of car lanes on each street was reduced from four to three. Yet the report finds car trip times were “generally not impacted” — they were slightly increased on Richmond and slightly decreased on Adelaide, but the report attributes the minor variations in travel times more to lane closures for construction than anything to do with the bike lanes.

On top of that, the roads were safer. Both motorists and cyclists reported in surveys that the roads felt more comfortable to travel on, and there were significant reductions in both motor vehicle collisions involving injury or death (down 18 per cent) and in all cyclist collisions (down 73 per cent).

Former chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat used to talk a lot about “low-hanging fruit” and “quick wins” when it came to transportation strategy. The streets are full, and there’s not really any room to build more roads, she would often say (and still does, in her capacity as private citizen and sometimes politician), and so we need to think about moving more people instead of moving more cars.

The success of the King St. streetcar pilot project, which appeared to have added about 12,000 to 14,000 riders per day (to a total of about 84,000 riders) in the year after some quick changes to the street to give the transit vehicles priority at a cost of about $1.5 million, has been held out as one obvious example of that philosophy providing a quick win. The success of the Richmond-Adelaide bike lanes, at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars for installation, seems to make the point all the more vividly.

These two transportation projects, installed in months at a total cost of less than $3 million, have brought about 20,000 new commuters travelling into the downtown core each day while making the roads safer and without making commute times dramatically worse for anyone.

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That is about a third of the ridership that the subway extension to the Scarborough Town Centre is expected to carry by 2031, at about one thousandth of the cost and less than one tenth of the construction time. It’s less than a fifth of the daily vehicle count on the Gardiner East, but rebuilding that will cost at least $1.4 billion — about 500 times as much.

In a city groaning under growth like Toronto is, it’s obvious that we need to build large new infrastructure pieces that will carry us through decades. But the success of both the Richmond-Adelaide bike lanes and the King streetcar show us there are also small infrastructure projects — low-hanging fruit — that can allow us to move a lot more people by making smaller, simpler changes.

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