As a citizen of downtown Accordion City and simultaneous member of the Creative and Professional classes (or, as some might put it less charitably, a BoBo -- short for bourgeois bohemian), I am a car driver and a cyclist.

I use the bike considerably more often than the car for many reasons. For starters, it's actually the most efficient form of transportation for short-distance runs where I live: just off the downtown core, in a nexus minutes from the financial, boutique shopping, club, Chinatown, creative/arts and student districts. During rush hour traffic, biking can get me to most of my regular destinations faster than my car, walking or public transport, and at no cost, save the occasional battery purchase for my bike's lights.

At the same time, I understand that cars have their uses too. The rest of my family live far off enough the subway lines that Sunday dinner is better reached by car. Trips to the grocery for a household of three salaried professionals are better done with a car. Anyone who's had to haul toddlers around knows how much support equipment they need, and how they're best carried by a minivan.

It is my belief that bikes and cars can co-exist in an urban situation. I think that it's impractical to have a car-free city, given the city's sprawl and the resulting social factors; I think it's the fantasy of overly strident Critical Massers and people who major in "work-deferral studies". At the same time, we must have bikes on the streets, and the belief otherwise is the product of a mind that believes that the storage of cars is the first priority of architecture and the sort of person who gets into the car to go to the corner store three blocks away. The city needs both cars and bikes.

Accordion City does have what's called a bike plan, and according to eye magazine, a local free weekly, it looks like this:

The underlying principle of the bike plan is that every Toronto street is a cycling street. The plan makes cyclist safety a priority during road construction, cleaning and maintenance, and guarantees bike access to major intersections, bridges and underpasses. It proposes major changes to the street system, including giving bikes two-way access to one-way streets, improving bike-activated traffic signals, developing better traffic-calming projects, widening curb lanes and even exempting bikes from some traffic laws.

There's more, and it's all in this article.

If you're a cyclist, car driver or both, feel free to leave a comment.