Inside Toronto put out a great little article last week about the City's budget, and put a lot of focus on the $3 million (rather than the $6 million promised) in the 2007 budget for bicycle infrastructure.

There has been a lot of hue and cry about the misguided and uneducated comments by Rob Ford about cyclists always being at fault in car-bike accidents, and this has perhaps overshadowed comments about bikelanes made by other councillors. Thankfully, Inside Toronto included some of these, starting with Ford's:

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"Roads are built for buses, cars and trucks, not for people on bikes. It's their own fault at the end of the day if they get hit. You shouldn't be in the middle of traffic riding your bike. If you want to ride your bike you've got beautiful parks. That's where you should ride your bike."
Rob Ford

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(Ford's comments drew fire from several of his colleagues... Giorgio Mammoliti pointed out that Ford had previously opposed spending any money on a bike path linking the northwest of the city with the downtown.)

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"Instead of my car being in front of Councillor Ford's car at a stoplight, or me turning left to pick up something at the variety store, my bike zooms along the side of the road and he can zoom past me," he said. "If we can get 50 to 60,000 people onto bikes, not only does it protect themselves and their families to have a cleaner, softer option to get to work, they help every single person who's in a car."
Glenn De Baeremaeker

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"If I thought for one minute, hundreds of thousands of people would start using their bicycles, I would be supportive, because people would be encouraged to get out of their cars," he said. "But that hasn't happened along Cosburn. So we're in a situation where there's an impression that as far as the public is concerned we're doing something for the greening of Toronto when in fact the experience has been that along Cosburn all we're doing is creating greater waiting times at major intersections. So it's fundamentally dishonest."
Case Ootes

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Labels: infrastructure, news, politics

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