My one reservation is whether we are underutilisin back streets. With Bloor and the Queensway having been suicide stretches for the past decade, I am accustomed to cycling using local streets eg Norseman, Chartwell, Shaver, Van Dusen.....
Here the challenge would be what
@Amare discusses vis a vis Kipling. Do those 'minor' streets connect to where cyclists want to go?
I would argue the primary destinations will be (not necessarily in order)
a) Humber College Lakeshore
b) Major High Schools
c) Subway Stations
d) Grocery Stores
e) Major employers
An awful lot of the above will be found on major streets and you still end up needing to find a connection point from your minor streets.
Minor N-S streets also typically don't cross the railway corridor, or the Gardiner.
Build a trail alongside Mimico Creek from Lakeshore to Bonnyview, connect that to Grenview, and you are at Bloor without ever seeing a truck or bus alongside..
Interesting idea, a few downsides.
- Nowhere near Islington/Kipling
- Requires building at least one bridge over Mimico Creek and would eliminate the baseball diamond in Jeff Healey Park
unless you bought 3 or so adjacent homes so you could shift it over.
- The route you selected is largely free of sidewalks, but has legal parking on one or both sides of the street. That can't co-exist with a serious cycling facility. You would have to remove all or most on-street parking, not sure how
the neighbours would feel about that idea........trade one controversy fro another.
Even a bi-directional multi-use path here would require 3M, plus 0.8M buffer.
From a 7.5M cross section....the math doesn't add up. As the pink lines reveal, there's plenty of ROW there if we take people's front yard's away........but
I think you'd have to take 1.5M off all the front yards here.
Otherwise, this is just a signed bike route, nothing else.
Also I measure it as 400M longer than the straighter equivalent distance on Islington.
