DIVIDING LINE

The Bloor Street bike lane has become Toronto's most contested strip of concrete, igniting fights over congestion, safety, and the future of downtown.

- KATE LUNAU

How a few kilometers of pavement turned the city into a battlefield

IT TOOK LESS THAN FIVE kilometers of bike lane to push the city over the edge. On its face, the extension of the Bloor Street West path from Runnymede to Resurrection Road, which links downtown's bike riding hub to the heart of Etobicoke com-muter country, seemed innocuous enough. After all, it was just the latest expansion of a stretch that started in the Annex in 2016. What was another handful of blocks in the scheme of things? Well, that depends who you ask.

The new lanes were installed last spring and split the surrounding neighbourhoods into two camps. One faction saw them as a welcome and overdue safety measure—six cyclists died on Toronto streets in 2024, the deadliest year since at least 2006. But some motorists and other residents were furious at seeing a vehicle lane handed off to bicycles in a city already paralyzed by gridlock. Public sentiment was loud and pitched. A community group calling itself Balance on Bloor circulated a petition demanding a re-evaluation of the design, which gathered nearly 14,000 signatures. The Old Sod, a pub on Bloor West, printed T-shirts that said "Fuck Bike Lanes" (the "u" and "c" were replaced with bike tires) and sold almost 300 of them. At the Taste of the Kingsway festival, a woman was photographed at the Balance on Bloor table. Someone posted that photo to a pro-cycling group on Reddit, where one user encouraged readers to "plow" the table with a bicycle. I spoke to residents of the Kingsway neighborhood last fall. Some lauded the new lanes, but others blamed them for a litany of problems: the loss of parking spaces, increased congestion, emergency vehicles waylaid by traffic and an overflow of cars onto residential streets. One resident said he'd never seen the community so divided.