Toronto is changing fast. New people are always arriving, new buildings going up, and getting around is more crowded and frustrating than ever. We’re a big city now.

Cyclists often bear the brunt of those frustrations — from honking and aggressive driver behaviour to so-called “war on the car” grandstanding — as they’re quite visible.

For many people, cycling is natural and the best way to get around a crowded city, but for others it’s alien. Maybe they have yet to be properly introduced to cycling or the city simply seems dangerous — which it has become, as those of us who ride daily understand profoundly. It’s why we need safe infrastructure in the form of separated lanes.

Unlike Barcelona or Berlin, Toronto doesn’t have bike lanes on every street — far from it. It’s confounding that the Germans, who pretty much invented the car and remain a car-loving people, also managed to build one of the most bike-friendly cities I’ve ever cycled, where all modes of transportation are given respect and space on nearly every street.

In Toronto, most of our bike lanes are cheap and dangerous, a line of often-faded paint on the pavement hardly the separated lanes that are needed. Those we do have end abruptly, dumping cyclists into traffic, or they revert to a cheap line of paint again. The cycling “grid” is unconnected. Imagine if cars had to navigate an incomplete road grid and go off road often. It would not stand.

Another common notion is that the city was built for the car but in fact bikes predated the invention of cars by decades. Cities were converted, often devouring themselves in the process, to accommodate cars. In the long history of global cities, cars have only been a blip, and even in rather young Toronto, founded in 1834, cars didn’t really start to dominate how streets were designed until around 70 years ago. The push for equal infrastructure is just correcting a relatively brief misstep in how we inequitably designed cities.

Although cyclists have had to fight loudly and publicly for the meagre bits of infrastructure achieved so far, there are more than 5,000 kilometres of road in Toronto and, as of February, only 39 kilometres of separated bike lanes, and 229 kilometres of lanes defined just by a line of paint. Most destinations, then, are not on a bike lane of any kind.

The Bloor bike lane gets a lot of attention. Last month Coun. Stephen Holyday said he and his Etobicoke constituents don’t feel as much a part of the city centre as they did before the lane went in. Who knew their connection could be so easily broken by 1.5-metre-wide lanes? They were hardly a surprise though as they’ve been a long time coming.

As early as 1977 a city report ranked Bloor as one of the best places to put a bike lane, as did another study in 1993. Activism for the Bloor lane began in earnest about 15 years ago and it was only launched as a 2.4-kilometre-long pilot project in 2016. Nearly 40 years is an incredibly long time to wait for a critical, if relatively short, bit of bike lane.

Compare to how quickly the billion-dollar Gardiner Expressway rebuild has happened, already underway, consuming 53 per cent of the city’s state-of-good-repair transportation budget. The bike lobby can only wish to have such influence.

Cyclists’ few lanes are often blamed for congestion rather than the fact there are simply too many cars on the road, something adding additional lanes will not help. Google “induced demand” and see why there is congestion on wide roads with no bike lanes. Only getting people into alternative forms of transit will help.

Imagine if all the cyclists that are so troublesome were instead each driving a car. Then we’d see some congestion. Every cyclist a motorist sees is one more car out of their way.

The reason cyclists take this seriously and are relentless in calls for more safe infrastructure is because it’s becoming routinely deadly, and if it isn’t deadly it risks the kinds of grievous injuries doctors euphemistically call “life changing.” We can either acknowledge that or wilfully ignore it, as if it’s no big deal, but that decision is a life-defining moral one to make.

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This fight for equitable and safe infrastructure is not just about cyclists. To be clear, we have to make the streets safe for all modes: cars, bikes and especially pedestrians. Lowering speed limits, actually enforcing road rules, and redesigning the streets will keep everyone alive and intact.

Badly behaved cyclists? They suck. I would bet good money that most cyclists also think they suck, especially the ones who ride through open streetcar doors or who put pedestrians at risk in any way. We can talk about them, but in no way are they the same kind of threat that drivers have become in Toronto. To conflate the two is another way to ignore our deadly problem and what needs to be done to fix it.

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Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef