The over all strategy is to reduce government power in favour of corporate power, and this was made very evident on election night when the first words out of Fords face, after he knew he had won, weren’t the catch phrases he repeated consistently through the election run, but a brand new one, one very familiar to me:

“Toronto is now open for business, ladies and gentlemen!”

(The Globe and Mail 10 25 2010)

Read the full post on Michael Holloway’s Blog

More people voted for noted anti-cyclist mayoral candidate Rob Ford than any other (but not the rest of them combined, it should be noted) yesterday, meaning that on Dec. 1st, he’ll become mayor.

Now that the campaign is over, it’ll be interesting how Toronto and the cycling community deal with the next 4 years.

Will the organized and political parts of the cycling community realize that, just like Ford has to build bridges with City Councillors, they have to build bridges with a Ford-run City Hall?

Or will they just devolve into the anarchistic behaviour of the more extreme factions of the cycling community?

What do you think is the best path?

Your City Councillors:

We put together a cool graph (to the right and below, click to enlarge) a few weeks ago that documents how bike-friendly a bunch of Councillors have been, according to how they’ve voted during the last 4 years.  Check to see if your Councillor is on there, and if you are happy with their record:

Your Mayor:

The Mayoral race gets the most attention… but remember that whoever wins… they are still only 1 vote out of 45 votes on Council.  The Mayor does not get free reign over city policies and funds.

Rob Ford is infamous for thinking that cycling is not a valid form of transportation.  He wants to keep bikelanes and paths to Hydro Corridors and Ravines.  To give him due credit, he *has* said that bikelanes “make sense downtown, where there are lots of cyclists”.

• Rob Ford releases “Transportation Plan”
• Ford says Cyclists at Fault when hit by cars

George Smitherman is a little bit more pro-bike than Rob Ford.  He has called for physically-separate bikelanes and a re-imagining of Toronto’s BikePlan to integrate it into public transit better.  He has called for a moratorium on new bikelanes until this “re-imagining” takes place.

• George Smitherman Releases His Transportation Plan

Joe Pantalone is the most progressive of the 3 “front-runners”.  His policies basically are a continuation of the policies of Mayor Miller (Joe’s the Deputy Mayor, after all).  He says the current BikePlan can be finished by 2012, but considering that recent years have only seen 5-30 km installed per year, and there are hundreds and hundreds left to install, 2012 seems a tad ambitious, if not entirely fantasy.

If you’re like me, you’re also looking at how a potential Mayor will address issues like the less-fortunate, the arts, and public transit among other things.

BeautifulCity.ca has put together a handy chart that shows you how the 3 candidates rate on a bunch of progressive issues:

Get out there and vote!

With an election on Monday, let’s tell candidates how attractive bike lanes on Bloor could be, and how necessary for our safety, and to fight climate change!

Please invite your friends, cycling strangers and neighbours.

Starts at High Park at noon and rides east along Bloor, past Joe Pantelone’s office and down to George Smitherman’s office (Ford’s is near the airport)

For info about where candidates stand on Bloor/Danforth bike lanes, see question #5 on
www.torontocat.ca/main/platform_election_surveys

And visit www.takethetooker.ca

We bike – We vote!

Check out the facebook event page for it here.

Here at BikingToronto we decided to take it one step further and figure out (Google Doc) exactly who were the bike-friendliest Councillors in terms of Council voting (and who were the most bike-UNfriendliest).

The chart below takes all the voting records in the Bike Union document and gave Councillors +1 point when they made a bike-friendly vote and -1 point when they either made a bike-UNfriendly vote or didn’t bother to show up to vote.

Now we can all see, quickly and easily, who is the friendliest and who is the unfriendliest.

• Click here to view it full size
  
• Download it in PDF format.
• View the Google Doc where we recorded all the votes

They’ve just released a wrap-up (PDF) of the voting records of every member of City Council on all bike-related decisions, which they made with the help of the Election Survey done by TCAT recently:

Check out our bike friendly summary of TCAT’s election survey – see the documents attached below! The Toronto Cyclists Union has identified a list of candidates who possess the potential to best understand and support the needs of cyclists in Toronto. This list was compiled solely based on candidates who completed the TCAT election survey.

Check out the document (PDF) and see how bike-friendly your city councillor has been.

A few days ago we told you about Rocco Rossi’s Flip-Flop on bikelanes on major streets (he likes the idea now).

The Toronto Star has published a map (above) of where these physically-separate bikelanes would be.

Rossi’s proposed network includes east-west lanes on Richmond St. between Parliament and Bathurst Sts., and the existing Wellesley Ave.-Harbord St. lane separated from traffic between Parliament and Ossington Ave.

Cyclists travelling north-south would use the existing Sherbourne St. lane that would be separated from traffic between Elm Ave. and Queens Quay; or, to the west, the St. George St./Beverly St. lane extended to Queens Quay.

Rossi says building dedicated lanes in other cities has cost between $168,000 and $454,000 per kilometre.

His plan was quickly denounced as “a last-minute, half-baked idea” by Yvonne Bambrick, spokeswoman for the cyclists union.

“All he’s doing is tweaking (routes) that exist already,” and separating them from traffic, rather than proposing a true network that includes the suburbs, she said.

What do you think of Rossi’s new bikelane plan?

TCAT surveyed all Toronto candidates to provide voters the candidates’ views on active transportation issues and the concrete steps that can be taken to improve cycling and walking in Toronto. Surveys were sent in August 2010 to all of the mayoral, councillor and school trustee candidates – 475 candidates in total, with 137 respondents to date.

Some of the cycling-related questions were as follows:

• 2010 Mayoral Candidates
• 2010 Council Candidates
• 2010 School Trustee Candidates

Sarah Thomson has dropped out of Toronto’s mayoral race and put her support behind George Smitherman.

This is big news for cycling because Thomson’s “BikeCity” plan was the most thorough and best researched cycling platform out there (of the “Big Five” contenders of Ford, Smitherman, Rossi, Pantalone and Thomson herself).  Whatever you thought of her other campaign platforms, she had done her homework on the “cycling portfolio”.

George Smitherman’s transportation platform is a little less thorough (he wants to “pause” the installation of new bikelanes, while at the same time advocating for physically-separate lanes), but he did sign up for Bixi Toronto on the weekend, so that’s a good sign.

The Mayoral Race is shaping up to be a contest between Smitherman and Rob Ford.  Ford is known for not only saying cyclists are inconsequential, but that if they get hit by a car, it’s their own fault.

Not only has he flip-flopped on the issue, but now he wants “physically seperate” bikelanes:

“In Toronto we’ve made some progress in laying down bike lanes, but we’ve fallen far behind other cities in introducing separated bike lanes that are part of a continuous network,” said Rossi.

Rossi’s separated and safe bike lane network would consist of four new major lanes separated from traffic by a curb.

One east-west lane would run from Parliament Street to Bathurst Street along Richmond Street. Another east-west lane would see the existing Wellesley-Harbord lane completed and separated from traffic between Parliament Street and Ossington Avenue.

The existing Sherbourne Street bike lane would be separated from traffic between Elm Avenue and Queens Quay. A second north-south lane would see the existing St. George/Beverley lane extended to Queens Quay and separated from traffic.

Rossi thinks this new statement jives with his “cyclists don’t belong on major streets” statements from earlier this year, but it doesn’t.  He STILL wants to tear out the Jarvis Bikelane (which I personally use twice a day, but I guess my taxes are somehow less important?)

The fact is that Richmond, Wellesley and St. George/Beverley are all major roads in downtown Toronto, which means this new statement is a major flip-flop for this mayoral candidate.

What do YOU think of Rossi’s Flip-Flop on Bikelanes?