Cycling advocates scored a big victory in May when council voted 38-3 to install a pilot project of separated bike lanes on Bloor St. W.

But that victory may be short-lived if the lanes don’t work.

Council will decide in the second half of 2017 whether to make the cycle tracks permanent. That vote will largely depend on a raft of data the city collects between now and next summer as part of what transportation staff say is “the most comprehensive performance evaluation” ever undertaken for a cycling project in Toronto.

At a soft launch of the closely watched project Friday morning, the city is expected to announce a partnership relating to the evaluation of the bike lanes. (The construction of which began along a 2.6-km stretch of Bloor between Avenue Rd. and Shaw St. last Tuesday; it could be fully complete by early next week.)

Mayor John Tory has backed the $500,000 pilot, but he has also been clear that if the evaluation isn’t favourable, he won’t hesitate to push for the lanes to be removed.

“I’m going to be certainly wanting to see that it’s measured rigorously,” he told council May 4. “If the measurements show overall, taken overall as a whole, this was bad for neighbourhoods, bad for business . . . then I will be advocating it be taken out.”

Jacquelyn Hayward Gulati, the city’s manager of cycling infrastructure, said Bloor’s importance as both a retail strip and arterial road, as well as the decades-long debate about whether it’s suitable for bike infrastructure, means “we need to be extremely thorough about whether this pilot project is effective or not.”

The methodology the transportation department will use for the evaluation, which Gulati said will cost $60,000, is based in part on guidelines published by New York City and the U.S. Department of Transportation, and involves measuring everything from car and cycling traffic patterns, availability of on- and off-street parking, trends in local retail sales and public support.

Three rounds of study are planned: one, to collect baseline data, was completed earlier this year, and two more are planned for this fall and June 2017.

The results will be included in a report to the public-works committee in the third quarter of next year, along with a recommendation on whether the pilot project should be “maintained, modified or removed.”

In a departure from previous bike lane studies, transportation staff won’t just be looking at Bloor. They’ll also study bicycle and motor vehicle patterns on the parallel roads of Dupont St. and Harbord St., as well as monitoring local side streets for traffic “infiltration.”

According to Gulati, in a first for Toronto, the city will use 23 cameras set up on Bloor, Harbord, and Dupont, to automatically produce bicycle and motor vehicle counts. In total, she said, almost 5,000 hours of traffic footage will be analyzed.

The city has also contracted a consultant to perform “travel time runs” on the three parallel streets, which will involve using car-mounted GPS trackers to measure how long it takes to drive from one end to the other.

One aspect of the lanes the city can’t measure directly, according to Gulati, is their effect on cyclist safety. That’s because it usually takes about three years to collect reliable traffic collision data and “it’s difficult over a one-year pilot project to come to conclusions about safety.” However, the city will perform intercept surveys that will ask riders if they feel safer in the lanes.

Local Councillor Joe Cressy (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina), who has been a strong proponent of the pilot project, acknowledged that with so much data being collected it will be easy for the bike lane’s critics to “choose the numbers that suit their argument” and some will focus only on how the lanes affect car travel times. But he stressed that the “complete package” of information should be considered.

Cressy said he welcomes the comprehensive evaluation because he thinks it will provide hard data showing that the bike lanes will make Bloor safer for pedestrians and cyclists and boost local business.

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“For too long bike lanes in general, but especially on Bloor, were seen as controversial. And I think if you’re going to effectively win the case to transform Toronto into a true 21st-century city that believes in 21st-century transportation options, then you need to demonstrate that it works.”

Correction -August 12, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the estimated cost to evaluate the effectiveness of the bike lanes on Bloor St. W. Incorrect numbers were provided to the Star.