Originally Posted by
noglider
I've been riding a little in Brooklyn and Queens, two of NYC's so-called outer boroughs, which the city tends to neglect in infrastructure. Well, gee, there are bike lanes in a great many places, and on streets that don't have room, the single travel lane is being marked as a shared lane for motor vehicles and bikes. In other words, pretty much every street is becoming a bike route.
Mayor Bloomberg kicked this all off. Mayor Deblasio came into office in January, and he's known to be somewhat less pro-bike, though I expect him to be a better mayor overall. I hope he continues the current plans for bike infrastructure.
Here in Boston, previous long-term Mayor Tom Meninino was a staunch cycling advocate. He himself was about as “Fred” a cyclist as you could imagine, and took some ribbing of pictures on him on the road on his early morning outings. I always hoped I could encounter him as I rode though his neighborhood.
Nonetheless, he was a powerful and effective mayor and remade the city as a cycling model with numerous bike lanes and a very successful bike-sharing system (Hubways). Indeed he had, and the new mayor retains, a bike “czar,” Nicole Freedman.
Contrast him with Toronto’s Mayor, Rob Ford:
Originally Posted by Boston Globe
But Ford reserves special venom for the menace called the bicycle. He is perhaps the most antibike politician in the world. In 2007, he told the Toronto City Council that roads were designed for only buses, cars, and trucks. If cyclists got killed on roads, “it’s their own fault at the end of the day,” he said. He compared biking on a city street to swimming with sharks—“sooner or later you’re going to get bitten.” He once summarized his views in City Hall succinctly: “Cyclists are a pain in the ass to the motorists.”…
Originally Posted by Jim from Boston
I visited Toronto this summer, and wrote about my visit to a couple of Torontonian subscribers to Bike Forums:
…“While in Toronto, I met a cycling advocate, and he asked me how Boston compared, and I had to admit urban riding in TO was a lot scarier than in Boston. In comparing notes, he blamed it on the Mayor, who 'drove an SUV,' while I praised our mayor for his commitment to cycling, and even hired a former Olympic cyclist as a "Bicycling Czar." It seems our Hubways Bike-Share system is doing well, while your Bixi Bikes is having some difficulty. Nonetheless, I was impressed with the number of cyclists I saw...."