The rush for Wellington bike lanes is misguided

I have lived on or within a block of Wellington Crescent for 35 years.

I drive my vehicle on the Crescent almost every day, and cycle regularly on the Crescent in the summertime. Not once have I felt unsafe driving or cycling on the Crescent. However, that could soon change.

The city is voting on whether to approve bike lanes on Wellington Crescent, which would reduce vehicular traffic to one lane each way from Academy to Stradbrook and reduce speed to 40 km/h.

If the botched bike lanes on River and Stradbrook avenues are any indication, drivers on Wellington Crescent are in for a rough ride.

The River/Stradbrook bike lanes have resulted in travel lanes so narrow that driving on them means doing everything in your power to avoid colliding with the vehicle next to you.

This is not traffic calming. It is engineered danger.

It gets worse. The Wellington Crescent bike lane proposal restricts drivers from making left-hand turns onto the Crescent from Dorchester and Gertrude.

That means all vehicles that used to be able to access the Crescent directly would now have to cut through adjacent residential neighbourhoods in order to make left-hand turns onto the Crescent — via Hugo, McMillan, Lilac, Ruskin, Palk, and Kingsway — streets that lack cycling infrastructure and are ill-equipped for increased traffic volumes.

Rather than improving safety, the proposed bike plan simply offloads the safety risk from Wellington Crescent onto adjacent neighbourhoods.

While bike lobbyists are quick to demand things like bike lanes, reduced speeds and turning restrictions, they are silent when it comes to the downstream dangers these measures impose on nearby residential communities.

In their support of bike lanes on the crescent, bike lobbyists have repeatedly invoked the death of a cyclist who was tragically killed in 2024 by an SUV travelling 159 kilometres per hour. The sad reality is that no bike lane can protect a cyclist from a maniac driving at extreme speeds.

And if the dinky physical barriers (low curbs, really) on the River/Stradbrook bike lanes are any indication of what is in store for the crescent, they wouldn’t even protect a cyclist from a vehicle going the legal speed limit. This calls into question whether the push for bike lanes on the crescent is really about safety at all, or merely reactive.

Coun. Russ Wyatt hit the nail on the head when he said the city would be “jumping the queue” by approving the Wellington Crescent bike lanes. In a city with limited resources, moving the Wellington Crescent bike lanes to the front of the line means other deserving active transportation projects already in the works — many designed to improve cyclist safety — would have to be delayed or scrapped altogether.

That is not leadership. That is pandering to the squeaky wheel.

There are other ways to make Wellington Crescent safer for cyclists without eliminating two lanes of vehicular traffic.

The stretch of the crescent under consideration for bike lanes is blessed with wide boulevards on both sides. There is no reason bike lanes could not be located there, parallel to the sidewalks. It would be far less expensive and pose no disruption whatsoever to vehicular traffic. Nor would it rely on physical barriers to keep cyclists safe from traffic.

Allowing left-hand turns from Grosvenor onto Wellington Crescent would also go a long way toward alleviating unsafe levels of vehicular traffic on nearby residential streets.

As citizens, we should not have to tolerate poorly conceived bike lanes that fail to adequately protect cyclists, make roads more dangerous for drivers, and offload arterial traffic onto unsuspecting residential communities.

Expanding cycling infrastructure that actually makes streets safer for cyclists is an important goal as we move forward as a city. However, we should let sound planning, data and due process tell us where bike lanes should be located — and when — not special interest groups.

John Youngman has lived, walked, driven and cycled on and around Wellington Crescent for 35 years.