Free wheelin'?

Like I already mentioned in a previous post, riding a bicycle in Toronto is pretty rough compared to European cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Helsinki. With no dedicated bike lanes (there are some bike lanes, but they're just painted lanes which car drivers may or may not respect), bicyclists are forced to ride their bikes on the street with cars. Most of the time it's okay, but when you want to make a left turn on your bike, I rather stop, walk my bike across the streetwalk with pedestrians and then get on it again and ride away.

I've been told there are several groups that lobby for more bike lanes in the city, and I think at some point I'll join one of the those groups. The city of Toronto and TTC (The Toronto Transit Commission, the local version of HKL) have got some programs to make things better for cyclists, and the number of people I see cycling here is actually pretty big, but for now Toronto still remains a car city, like pretty much all cities in North America, where drivers come first and then everybody else. In this city of around 4.5 million people, there is not a single pedestrians-only street/zone. Can you believe it? In most of western Europe that'd be unthinkable.

But as much as I could bitch about the difficulties of cycling here, I don't want to lose touch with reality here - it's not all negative stuff that I have noticed. In Helsinki, there are actually some cyclists who say that it'd be better if they scrapped the bike lanes that exist now and just have cyclists ride with the traffic like here in Toronto - that way there would be no pedestrians who constantly walk on the bike lanes where they are not supposed to be(I used to complain about that pretty often when I lived there). Some drivers in Toronto can be pretty ignorant, but so it is in Helsinki, too - there I was always complaining about how many drivers hit the red light every day and speed and don't look out for cyclists at intersections etc. I find that here most people are actually very polite in traffic and usually watch out for people cycling. Many cyclists themselves though here show almost total disregard of traffic rules; they don't signal when they turn, they ride on the sidewalk, they ride against the red light, etc. So it's not always car drivers who are to be blamed for poor behavior in traffic.