Time to report on Toronto (I'm now in Montreal), the second stop on a cross-continent train-and-bike trip. To find out why I'm taking the long way to New York read my first post.

I was disappointed when I got to Toronto. I had this idea that it was really bike friendly for some reason, perhaps because someone told me so, perhaps just because it's in Canada and I naively assume that everything in Canada must be better than in the US and that they are immune to sprawl and lousy driving and all those evils.

Not so.

I got a bike map when I arrived, and at first glance I was horrified - the bike lanes are shown in danger-red (my pet peeve), there aren't many of them, and they didn't seem to connect or go any appreciable distance across town. At first I thought it was just the map and I grumbled about it being a lousy map, but that turned out to be the reality on the ground.

Still, the map made things worse for me when I ventured out. Very few low-traffic routes are identified, and if you look quickly they appear to be the same color as something described appealingly as "Connections." One is light brown, one is mauve. Distinct under good light and a calm gaze; not so distinct when route planning in a hurry at a stop light. Some harrowing bike rides revealed that "connections" meant riding a few blocks or a mile on a freeway or some other awful route to connect two decent routes. That's a mean trick!

Plus it's chock full of every municipal icon possible, from police stations to subway stations to parking lots. And the split between one side of the map and the other goes right through downtown. It's a mess. (Here's where I accidentally got on the goddamn freeway on my folding bike, an inevitability obscured by Necropolis Cemetery, a public restroom, and some other icons. Can you find the freeway? I didn't see it either.)

I'm sorry to be such a pill about the map but now that I know how well it can be done (thanks to Metro, and more recently, TransLink in Vancouver, BC) I just won't abide anything less. I hope in the next version they at least put a central-city blow-up on one side, make the nice bike routes a nice color, make the nasty routes a nasty color, dump all the junk, and put some serious research into low-traffic routes that people actually take.

Because I know now that they take secret low-traffic routes. I asked people I met if they cycled, and where. Whether they did or just knew people who did, they said most people ride on back streets that aren't on the bike map, piecing together their own roundabout routes, using the big streets only when they have too.

Unfortunately, they often have to use the big streets. And those low-traffic routes aren't fast and aren't direct.

The reason for this is that Toronto has a connectivity problem. When Portland and Vancouver were laid out by planners in the mid- and late-1800s, respectively, they were mostly laid out on a grid, with great street connectivity - i.e. blocks are short, there are few dead-ends or dog-legs, and there are generally many many routes between two particular points.

Connectivity 101: Good connectivity makes a place easy to walk and bike, intuitive for route-finding, and allows traffic to distribute itself through the grid of streets. In a place with bad connectivity, like many squirmy-street suburbs and, to a lesser degree, like Toronto (see picture below), the only way to go between many places requires going out to the big street or arterial. This means few low-traffic routes of significant length for walkers and bikers, and it also means that all the car traffic funnels onto the large streets, which makes them that much more congested and unpleasant to bike on or across. (If you want to wonk out on connectivity, read this.)

So readers, be grateful for the connected streets in Portland, Corvallis and Eugene, if you live there. For me, Toronto was a glimpse of what a dense, vibrant, transit-oriented city (albeit with 3x the population of Portland) with a bike-interested populace feels like when it doesn't have connected streets. Not so good!

So much of the biking I did is like this:

Between the door zone and the car lane on busy streets, and things get complicated when it's time to cross those streetcar tracks (though they're much shallower than those in Portland, so that helps).

Toronto drivers are fast and aggressive. I often got passed within inches, even when I was taking the lane - my vehicular cycling tricks were useless - and as a pedestrian, had drivers push through a gap in pedestrians exactly the width of their car at crosswalks. I actually kicked a car once, that's how mad it made me, and how close they got (I remember my dad kicked a car for the same reason when I was a kid, and his toenail turned black and eventually fell off when I stepped on his foot one morning in the kitchen; I thought about that when I kicked the car, and only tapped it lightly). Another time, while waiting at a red light, a right-turning car turned my handlebars under me as he rubbed by.

But lots of people are biking on big and small streets alike! I am impressed. I saw quite a few fathers and sons out on the weekend and a smaller but noticeable number of moms with kids, so I can only imagine how many would try biking if they didn't have to ride in the squeeze zone. The town bristles with bicycles, parked to everything on the street, on porches, stairways, on the backs of cars, piled up in backyards. Everyone has a bike.

I got to meet some local bike advocates while I was in town. Actually, I got to meet 1,500 of them. I happened to be there for a big demonstration for "Bike Lanes on Bloor St." The group of demonstrators was cheery, with lots of families (and even some dogs).

All 1,500 riders, with the help of the police, took over half of Bloor St. and rode five miles from a park to the center of town (in this photo, we're passing the Bata Shoe Museum, which I had visited the day before).

The demonstration ended with speeches and apples (someone brought hundreds of apples) on the steps of the provincial assembly, a big grand building with lots of tourists milling around. The tourists' jaws all dropped and their cameras came out when thousands of happy bicyclists appearing out of nowhere. And these two security guards were a little taken aback but ultimately asked the demonstrators to move a few yards south. Which they did.

Toronto's connectivity challenges mean that bike lanes on big streets like Bloor - the only streets that go straight for any appreciable distance - are very important. But bike lanes on arterial streets also means (cue the minor chord progression) REMOVING ON-STREET PARKING. Oh the horror.

Bloor St. runs right through downtown and the University of Toronto. Years ago the city established that Bloor would be the most appropriate place for a continuous bike route across the central city, and it is a popular route for bicyclists today despite having no facilities and no extra lane width. The merchants are against the removal of car parking on one side of the street for a bike lane. Yet there is a subway directly underneath Bloor St that carries half a million people A DAY, so it's hard to believe much of their business depends on the ten car spots on their block. The bike advocates are as mad as I imagine Canadian advocates get; it's a friendly, decorous kind of mad.

They are frustrated more generally, though, with the City of Toronto, which they say has put biking on the back burner. A bike plan was adopted 8 years ago, and they say nothing in it has been implemented besides the installation of copious ring-and-post bike stands, like these at left (there are so many of them around town - it is really awesome to find bike parking everywhere you need it), three very short bike lane segments coming soon, and a pilot project - not even a permanent commitment - to put bike racks on a few downtown bus routes. Not much to show for 8 years.

If I were the Queen of Toronto, I'd put tons of money into bike lanes and cycletracks on the arterials (like the ones I'm riding on in Montreal today, which I'll cover later), and I'd link and improve the difficult-to-connect back routes with signage and major street crossings. They've already got a tradition of traffic calming, as I saw bump-outs and diverters on many residential streets (ironically, making the street connectivity even worse) so that's ready to be taken advantage of.

The Toronto bicycling community just last week saw the launch of it's first perpetual, membership-based bike advocacy group, Toronto Cyclists Union. Until now, groups have been ad hoc, organized around specific issues or projects. The bicyclist-to-bike-facility ratio is very high, the enthusiasm in the press and on the streets is apparent, and everyone is talking about peak oil and global warming, so I think that Toronto might be at a tipping point for prioritizing bike transportation.

Toronto's connectivity problems are a challenge, but cities with worse have done far better for bikes. It'll take a big push from the citizenry, and leadership, and money to make it happen. I'm hopeful.

To leave on a happy note, check out all the condiments available at Toronto hot dog stands! (Strangely, the only street food I saw anywhere in the city was hot dogs; but the condiments make up for the lack of variety.) Top, left to right: barbecue sauce, yellow mustard, more yellow mustard, hot mustard, ketchup, bacon bits, german mustard, Sriracha, honey mustard (not pictured: mayonnaise, in the fridge). Botton, left to right: green olives, canned sweet corn, unnaturally green relish, picked peppers, sauerkraut, bread and butter pickles, onions. YUM.

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