Claude Alain cycles almost five kilometres to and from his workplace in North York every day.

The Yonge and Eglinton resident uses side streets to get to Baycrest Health Sciences near Bathurst St. and Hwy. 401, where he is a senior scientist.

Despite a lack of safe bike infrastructure, the area where he works has seen a slight growth in the number of people biking to work from 2006 to 2016, a new report indicates.

“It’s good for the environment,” Alain said. “It’s a good workout … when you’re done from work, I like getting on the bike and going home and it kind of separates work from home.”

The report, put out by the Toronto Centre for Active Transportation (TCAT), an organization advocating for a better cycling and pedestrian environment, analyzed census data in the city’s three community council areas, Scarborough, North York and Etobicoke York, and found the majority of the suburbs remained static, with some slight increases and decreases in cycling to work.

Seven areas saw increases ranging from 1 to 3 per cent over the time frame. In a part of south Etobicoke, the rate was even higher.

Five of them are near hospitals or post-secondary schools: Rexdale around Finch Ave. and Hwy. 27, south Etobicoke (Long Branch, New Toronto and Mimico), Willowdale around Finch Ave. and Bathurst St., Lawrence Manor around Bathurst and Hwy. 401 and Bendale around Ellesmere and McCowan roads.

“These hospitals and college campuses create employment hubs,” said TCAT’s Yvonne Verlinden, the report’s author. “That’s real opportunity and people might live close enough to their workplaces to cycle.”

Alain said he’s seen more people riding bikes in his neighbourhood.

“It seems to increase progressively,” he said.

Verlinden agrees, adding she thinks there’s growing interest in suburban cycling.

“I think people often see the suburbs as uniform like ‘Oh, the suburbs are all the same’ but that’s not really true and that’s what we discovered through our Scarborough Cycles program,” she said.

“Neighbourhoods are very different from one to another, and there’s places where there’s higher density, more destinations that you can cycle to and these are places where we might see some increase and might be useful to go in and do some encouragement.”

Scarborough Cycles started in 2015 and aims to promote cycling in the neighbourhood. TCAT and its partners have opened community bike hubs that offer access to bicycles, tools and more throughout Scarborough to achieve its goal.

The report found Wexford around Victoria Park and Lawrence avenues and Oakridge around Victoria Park and Danforth avenues to be outliers as they’re not near schools or hospitals, but the latter location is near one of its bike hubs, which wasn’t open when the data was collected.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“Extensive research went into the selection of these sites,” the report stated. “Factors such as density of short trips, household car ownership, and available cycling infrastructure were used to identify neighbourhoods with the greatest cycling potential, so it is not surprising that this neighbourhood saw an increase in cycling.”

In order to increase cycling overall in the suburbs, Verlinden said there needs to be more safe infrastructure, more bike shops and the “cultural norm needs to shift so that this becomes (a) mainstream” method of transportation.

“The suburbs have all this potential,” she said. “We thought we’d like to explore it further and start to incubate cycling culture beyond the downtown.”