Making cycling safer in Toronto dominated an online discussion with Cycle Toronto's executive director Jared Kolb on Monday at thestar.com. Here's an edited sample of some of the questions he addressed.

I travel a lot and often see bike lanes in the U.S. on the roads protected by concrete barriers for safety. In a city that already has a vehicle gridlock problem such as Toronto, do you see this option as anything that would even get looked at?

Over the past several years, protected bike lanes have taken off across North America. Between 1874 and 2011, 78 of these facilities were built in America. By 2014, there were 191 protected bike lanes in America.

Toronto committed to building a downtown network of protected bike lanes in 2011 and rolled out its first partially separated lane on Sherbourne St. in 2012. Since then, we've seen them added on Wellesley, Richmond and Adelaide, all with different designs. It's crucial that we adopt more protected lanes to create a city-wide grid using more significant types of separation like hard curbs and planter pots.

Toronto has over 15,000 per-lane kilometres of roads city-wide, but just over 15 per-lane kilometres of protected lanes.

What scares me is that bike infrastructure can be installed and removed on a political whim. Can you comment on the removal of bike lanes on Jarvis St.?

Our roads remain hotly political in Toronto. Compounding this, our roads aren't getting any wider. We need to find more efficient ways for people to move. This is in part what was so damaging about Jarvis. City staff said that, at worst, the new lanes on Jarvis increased (car) commute times by two minutes. Yet bicycle traffic tripled over the first two years and traffic injuries were reduced.

The last few years have seen several new protected cycle lanes in Toronto such as Sherbourne, Richmond, Adelaide, Simcoe, and now Wellesley. A common feature of these lanes is that they provide separation and sometimes physical separation mid-block, however protection tends to disappear on the approach to intersections, allowing a wider turning radius for cars and causing a conflict between turning motorists and straight-travelling cyclists.

Just wondering which would be a higher priority — protected bike lanes or additional bike lanes in areas without them? Why?

I don't see them as mutually exclusive. If we're talking about building infrastructure on main streets with speed limits of 40 km/h or higher, they should be protected. If we're talking about residential roadways, we can certainly use paint, traffic calming and speed reductions. What we really need is a city-wide network. But that's going to cost some money. Our estimates suggest that the cycling budget should be at the very least doubled, from $8 million per year up to $16 million per year.

In your ideal vision for Toronto, are there contra-flow lanes on every suitable one-way street? So many residential streets could handle it, but do they need it?

It makes a lot of sense to build a super dense bicycle network in the downtown, and that means utilizing contra-flow lanes on many residential streets.

Compiled by Tess Kalinowski