Riding down Jarvis.
A controversial bike lane opened on Jarvis Street over the weekend and Tuesday morning saw cyclists using the lane. (July 27, 2010)
Staff photo/MARY GAUDET
As I set out on the bike lane on Shuter Street where it begins in the shadow of St. Michael's Hospital at Victoria Street, I am already dreaming of Jarvis.
It has been an illusive dream. For all my decades as a fair-weather bike commuter in the city core, Jarvis Street has remained a no-bike zone.
While it's technically possible and perfectly legal to make a two-wheeled run up Jarvis, few of us do: Jarvis was a rare fast route between downtown and north Toronto, engineered utilizing a centre lane that switches direction according to traffic volume. It was a fine strip of asphalt under the four wheels of my car - too much of a worry under the wheels of my bicycle.
But this week - all that changed.
Council has voted on the matter months ago. Mayoralty candidates were worrying about as recently as two weeks past.
And on Monday, July 27, the middle lane was replaced - by two narrow paths straddling the street. Bike lanes had come to Jarvis Street.
And on Tuesday, I ride toward them, to see how they rate.
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The bike lanes on Shuter Street have their pluses and minuses. On the plus side - they get nervous cyclists off the narrow, congested routes along Dundas or Queen Street, where cars battle for space with streetcars. On the minus - the road is rough, scarred with utility cuts every few metres, and there are cars parked inside the bike lane perimeter.
It beats Dundas, but a run up Jarvis - if it's half as nice to ride as it used to be to drive...
Looping south a block to the beginning of the northbound bike lane, it's encouraging. The middle lane is indeed gone, and the new lines are winter fresh. The road's not perfectly smooth - the white paint has dribbled into some of the deep cracks - but it's easier on the bike frame by far.
The Jarvis bike lanes don't have any cars parked inside them - the revitalization of Jarvis Street did not include on-street parking. So aside from a taxi stand recessed into the sidewalk outside the Grande Hotel, the only cars I deal with are the ones coming out of surface parking lots along Jarvis.
There aren't very many cyclists joining me on the ride back north either. But it's mid-morning on a mid-summer Tuesday. And the ride is nice.
Jarvis Street has its seamier side to it, but taking the route more slowly, you notice the old Jarvis mansions of a Toronto past. Some of them could use a little work - but really not very much, to turn the street into the grand old boulevard that the revitalization envisions.
It's just south of Gerrard Street that I meet up with the first cyclist I can gracefully stop and talk to: Lester Brown, who uses his bike to travel between downtown meetings and is riding Jarvis for the second time since the lines were painted.
"There were some problems yesterday," he tells me. "They hadn't done the diamonds up the middle yet. But I've been on it since the crews removed the centre lane, and the traffic has seemed to slow up a bit, and be civil."
Brown admits he was one of the brave few who occasionally rode his bike on Jarvis when the road was five much faster lanes.
"It wasn't very good - I've done it for short distances when I had meetings at the Grande Hotel. I used to find it very horrifying."
Brown likes the idea of bike lanes and doesn't mind saying so - and he likes this one, in part because it's so much better than the other major north-south bike route east of Yonge Street - Sherbourne.
"There are a few places where it needs patching, but it's better than Sherbourne. That's very bad. The lanes are even more dangerous. You have to swerve into traffic to avoid a pothole here. And this (Jarvis) is a much better incline."
Riding on, I see what he means. A ride up Sherbourne is a blow to a cyclist's self-esteem. It doesn't seem that steep, but it's a long and relentless climb up to Bloor on Sherbourne. At the end of it, cyclists feel five years older and 10 pounds heavier than they thought they were.
But it's not all sunshine on Jarvis.
At Wellesley and Sherbourne, Sergio Khatchadourian is shaking his head. He's the manager of Sterling Auto Centre, the Petro Canada station on the north-east corner of Jarvis and Sherbourne. Since the work began to remove the centre lane of traffic, he says rush hour has been one big congested headache.
"Between 4:30 and 6 p.m. you can't even get to the gas station," he said. "There are big problems."
The trouble, he says, is there simply aren't enough lanes to carry the car traffic. So the intersection is regularly gridlocked with cars trying to make their way through on a yellow and it becomes impossible to turn into or out of the gas station.
"I don't think I'm going to have an easy life here because if I don't get the traffic in, I don't sell gas - and I'm in trouble," he says, and ruefully points out the break in cyclists on Jarvis that seems to have lasted our entire conversation.
"Honestly - if we have 200 bikes a day or 500 bikes a day, I don't mind, but for seven or eight bikes a day - no," he says.
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The bike lanes end just shy of Bloor, which is fine - there's a complicated twist of intersection between Mt. Pleasant and Jarvis and Bloor that I really don't want to navigate on my bike. So I cut across Isabella Street to Sherbourne - to see what I think of Lester Brown's comparison.
It doesn't take long to conclude that Brown is an astute observer of bike lane quality. Heading south on Sherbourne, my teeth are chattering as I cross utility cuts into utility cuts, weave around potholes, and deke out into traffic around a bus parked - illegally - in the bike lane.
The only thing it's got going for it, heading south, is that steeper-than-you-think incline, which means that I'm taking on potholes and parked cars at a much faster speed than I would have on Jarvis.
As I turn my rattled bicycle back onto Shuter, I'm still brooding about Sherbourne.
All told - I think I preferred dreaming about Jarvis.