The Bloor bike lane took over a century
Cycling in Toronto
Toronto cyclists were lobbying City Hall for better infrastructure in 1896. The Bloor Street bike lane — arguably the city's flagship piece of cycling infrastructure — didn't open until 2016.
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Toronto's relationship with the bicycle is much older than the current bike lane debates suggest — and the timeline of one specific street, Bloor, tells the whole story in miniature.
An unexpectedly old fight
On February 15, 1896, Toronto bicycle club representatives met at the Athenaeum Club to lobby City Hall for a citywide cycling plan. Cycling's early-20th-century popularity decline cost advocates their political leverage for decades — a 1978 city-commissioned study considered a bike lane on Bloor and instead recommended a wider curb lane on the parallel Harbord Street; a 1990s study again flagged Bloor-Danforth as an ideal cross-town cycling route and again went nowhere.
Bells on Bloor and the eventual win
Modern grassroots pressure picked up with Bells on Bloor, formed in 2007, which organized annual "pedal-powered" bike parades down the street to demonstrate demand — 500 riders at the first parade in 2007, roughly 2,000 by 2009. A pilot protected bike lane finally opened along Bloor from Shaw Street to Avenue Road in August 2016, roughly 120 years after that first 1896 meeting, physically separated from traffic by posts and parked cars.
The network and bike share today
Toronto now runs a growing network of protected and painted bike lanes across the downtown core and select arterial roads, alongside Bike Share Toronto, a public docked bike-share system with stations concentrated downtown and expanding outward. Debates over new lane installations remain a genuinely recurring, often contentious item at city council — a modern echo of the same fight that started in 1896.
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Sources
- NOW Magazine — Bloor Bike Lanes: 120 Years in the Making
- Toronto Community Bikeways Coalition — Short History of Bike Lanes on Bloor
- Toronto Life — Dividing Line: How the Bloor Street Bike Lane Turned the City Into a Battlefield