Take comfort, beleaguered cyclists of Toronto, with your expensive U-locks and crippling fears over bike theft — the reinforcements are coming.

Arriving soon on a Toronto sidewalk, hopefully near you, is a new and improved version of the post-and-ring bike stand — one that can now withstand assaults by two-by-fours.

Six summers ago, news reports emerged that Toronto’s ubiquitous bike rings, which have been around since the mid-’80s, have a hidden flaw: the metal rings, which are attached to cylindrical posts, can be broken by thieves wielding two-by-fours.

Over the ensuing month, the city received 41 complaints about rings being busted by bike thieves. Officials were sent scrambling for a fix and began doubling up the rings for extra resistance. But behind the scenes, plans were underway to develop a new design.

Now, after six years and several prototypes, a sleeker but “beefier” version of the bike ring is finally poised to hit the streets, city officials say.

“It’s even more secure than the double ring,” says Daniel Egan, manager of cycling infrastructure and programs, who was involved with developing the new bike rings. “It’s not going to be broken by twisting it off.”

As it turns out, the solution is as simple as the scheme for breaking the rings. Instead of fastening to one side of the post — as the old rings did — the new version has a hole down the centre and slides over the pole, like a sleeve.

The new bike ring is also built much heftier; 17 pounds of aluminum, compared with the previous seven-pound design.

Unfortunately, there is only enough money in the budget right now to roll out 1,000 of the new bike rings — each costs $164 to produce and install. Manufacturing began early July and the plan is to start installing new rings by the end of the summer, says Fiona Chapman, a manager with the street furniture program, which now oversees the bike rings.

But Torontonians with a sentimental attachment to the old rings need not worry. The new design strongly resembles the original — not only does it have the same font (Sharp Face Gothic), it was designed by the same man.

When news first broke of the bike ring’s flaw, nobody was more upset than David Dennis, who designed the post-and-ring when he was an urban designer with the city.

“It was one of those depressing things,” says Dennis, who now works as an architect and industrial designer. “I personally felt awful that the ring failed and people had their bikes stolen.”

Dennis first came up with the post-and-ring concept in the mid-’80s, when existing bike racks around the city were rusting and falling over. According to Dennis, the cycling committee decided to issue a call-out to manufacturers to submit their ideas for new bike stands.

Along with the late Eric Pedersen, the city’s landscape architect at the time, Dennis flipped through the many proposals, which included A-shape designs and several coin-operated “contraptions.”

But then, he spotted a mock-up that involved some kind of frame attached to a parking meter.

“The idea struck me to make it as a circle on a parking meter,” Dennis recalls. “It was just sort of like the penny dropped. (We thought) yeah, this is it.”

Unfortunately, the public works department told them “to forget the idea” of attaching anything to their parking meters. “They didn’t want anything to do with that,” Dennis chuckles.

So, they opted to make their own posts for the rings to attach to. It was a smart but simple design — not only are the post-and-rings less obtrusive than bike racks, the ring also provides two contact points, so bikes don’t fall over as easily.

Today, some of the original rings can still be found around the city, bearing Dennis’s and Pedersen’s initials. Dennis delights in seeing the bike rings flash by in movie scenes filmed in Toronto. People also like to send him pictures of rings being used in unusual ways (among his favourites is a photo of a lawnmower locked up to a bike ring).

The ring has also been copied across the city — the TTC, for example, has its own version — and the world (versions of the post-and-ring have popped up everywhere from Michigan to London, England). And for many urban dwellers, they have become a beloved symbol of Toronto — one that even comes with its own creation myth.

According to local lore, it was the former NDP leader, the late Jack Layton, who dreamed up the simple-yet-effective design over pints at the pub — a eureka moment involving the intersection of a swizzle stick and a beer ring on a napkin.

It’s a narrative that Layton himself stuck by, to some extent. In 2006, he told Spacing magazine that while he gives Dennis full credit for designing the ring, he “vividly” remembers conceiving the idea at a pub near City Hall during a conversation about cyclists being ticketed for locking up to parking meters.

(For his part, Dennis praises Layton for bringing the rings into widespread use. But as someone who designs for a living, it has been irksome to hear someone else taking credit for the rings. “In your career, you don’t hit that many home runs. But when you do and it’s called back, that’s kind of annoying,” he says.)

But irrespective of who first conceived the idea, the bike ring seemed to lose some of its lustre in 2006, when revelations emerged of its hidden flaw.

Dennis was quick to realize, however, that the issue had a potentially easy fix. He began immediately working on a new design.

Progress was temporarily stalled in 2007, however, when city council contracted Astral Media for its street furniture program. Astral had its own idea for the new bike rings, but they failed to stand up to strength standards — and proved far costlier — so the city went back to Dennis’s design.

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Several prototypes have already been tested around the city over the past few years, including behind City Hall and outside the Air Canada Centre.

Extensive stress tests have also been conducted to make sure the ring holds up, with engineers taking everything from levers and sledgehammers to the new rings to test their mettle.

From an esthetic perspective, the newer ring is “quieter” and “less geeky,” according to Dennis. True to tradition, they will also bear his initials, along with another designer, John Prentice, who also contributed to the bike ring and is now in Australia.

The city plans to put 500 of the new rings towards the backlog of requests for new bike ring locations, according to Chapman. The other 500 will go toward replacing broken or missing rings.

But city officials emphasize that the new ring is no magic bullet. The vast majority of bicycles still go missing because of busted locks.

In Toronto, where 3,139 bikes were reported stolen last year alone, bike thieves have plenty of will — and they almost always find a way.

“There are very few thieves out there with trucks full of equipment and blowtorches and saws … but, I mean, it happens,” Egan says. “I have seen trees cut down to steal bikes. But there’s only so much you can do.”

By the numbers

Number of bike rings around the city: 16,000+

New bike rings being manufactured: 1,000

Cost to manufacture the new model: $78 per ring

Cost to manufacture the old model: $43 per ring

Number of outstanding requests for new bike ring locations: more than 1,000

Complaints about broken bike rings in 2006: 41

Number of new bike stands installed with the double ring: 2000

Number of rings that go missing or require repair: about 100 a year