TORONTO'S INSANITY OVER BIKES

POLITICIANS NEED TRAINING WHEELS ON THEIR MINDS

It's just before 9 a.m. on Harbord west of Spadina when three tots teeter by my car in shaky control of their bikes.
All legal since they were using Toronto's octopus tangle of bike lanes. Also insane since many parents, including me, would not have let Grade Oners ride on any road without running alongside waving medieval shields.
My son Mark and I are fighting morning traffic to get to the hospital complex on University which might as well be surrounded by a moat due to construction, cyclists, and stupidity.
 I lecture Mark, who knows the speech well, that cyclists should not be allowed to use major streets during rushhour. For that matter, there are some major arteries where bikes should be banned all the time, like the major highways.
Mark has lived and worked in China for years, to the extent he can speak Mandarin and some Cantonese. He points out that some streets in Shanghai, that giant city, are closed to bikes, the Chinese not being nuts about what used to be their major transportation.
At this point, a father drifts by our traffic jam on a big bike with one hand holding the seat of a kid's bike being ridden by a girl who may still be in kindergarten. She is zigzagging along the bike lane.
I see a cruiser coming and vainly try to flag it down. Much as I believe in letting parents raise their own kids without interference by the state, I didn't feel like testifying at a coroner's inquest because the odds were high that she might skid into traffic despite the efforts of the beanpole father wearing farmer's suspenders.
I would have sicced the cop on father-and daughter without misgiving, but I also concede that many cyclists, who have just been reminded again by new cycling laws that they have to act in all ways like vehicles on our roads, routinely don't while cops ignore the scofflaws.
I end up 20 minutes late for a major medical matter involving my wife primarily because cyclists near the city core were buzzing around like demented bees.
I daydreamed recently about a sarcastic column where I complained that cyclists were not obeying the new law that they must stay a metre away from vehicles.
Then I looked at that law again and saw that while the driver has to keep a metre from the bike, the cyclist has no such obligation.
Anyone who spends time driving downtown - since the suburbs, thank heavens, are not infested with this problem - knows it's often close encounters with a berserk culture with cyclists feeling free to push off your car to get a good start at the light or to scream and spit and pound if they feel you've intruded on their politician-annointed space.
What the new rules mean is that in heavy traffic with congested bike lanes, drivers can not pass the cyclist if they are on the outside edge of the lane unless by some miracle he can use part of the opposite lane.
I know from personal experience that it's difficult to predict the future without looking foolish. Some writer fished out predictions I made about city life in a magazine 25 years ago and I didn't do that well. But I predict that in a decade or so, people will look back at this current boom in Toronto bike lanes and think our politicians were rather stupid.
The facts about cars and drivers and insurance and municipal costs don't lie. There are no real facts about cyclists and bikes because the supposed ones are created by activists and anti-car movements. They produce more alternative facts than Trump!
So we spend fortunes constructing roads that will carry heavy loads, and on those roads we move costly machines covered by expensive insurance driven by men and women after difficult tests. Each machine can carry one or two or many people quickly no matter what the weather.
Yet our politicians insist that little cheaper machines that move comparatively slowly as they carry one person without insurance or operator testing over the same expensive asphalt can interfere with commuting and commercial delivery so that all other movements are compromised.
It makes no sense to steal space from cars and trucks and buses and streetcars which carry 99.9 % of the transportation burden of the city. After all, bike paths cost a fraction of roads constructed to withstand traffic.
Then add the crushing fact beyond lousy personal fitness. For too much of the year (remember the joke we get 9 months of cold weather and three months of bad skiing) most of us don't chose to ride in the rain or the snow or the cold and certainly not after 9.
Oh yeah, cyclists will say, just another anti-bike rant.
I have a personal lexicon of bike truths. I've done my share of bike riding in this city beyond bike-a-thons. I remember being forced into a ditch but I caught the truck driver and challenged him to a fight. He went through the light to escape.  I have had a bike stolen and two bikes of sons vanished. One son rode a bike to work for years. Another son has competed in Iron Man races where cycling was part of the endurance.
I have even been in two bike collision as a pedestrian.  I was hit by a cyclist speeding on the sidewalk as I left a downtown King St. restaurant. Since he and his bike were injured and I was only bruised, it didn't leave me with the same bad feeling I get while driving downtown and looking at the uneconomic and silly accommodations our politicians are making for a minority who rip off the taxpayers in the guise of noble healthy transportation.
For 60 hours a week for six months a year, we screw up traffic for a giant majority 24-7. It doesn't compute. Let them stick to lanes, parks, councillors' streets and bikeways far from traffic.