As the ongoing municipal election campaign has demonstrated, building a bike-friendly city is not without controversy, and it's not easy. But the Netherlands has managed the job pretty successfully. "The bicycle is the most popular form of transportation for the 16 million people who live in the Netherlands," Dutch Consul General to Toronto Hans Horbach recently said in a statement. He noted that there are more bikes than people in his country, "resulting in less traffic, less pollution and a healthier population."
Visiting experts from the Netherlands were in town this week to share lessons from the most successful cycling country in the world with Toronto transportation planners, engineers and cyclists. During the two-day
ThinkBike event held September 20 and 21 at the El Mocambo nightclub, experts shared best practices information about Dutch cycling infrastructre, and surveyed the downtown core and the Sherbourne Street corridor to suggest improvements for increasing bike use. According to organizers, the workshops included topics such as "bike safety, communting by bike, biking to school, bike parking, bikes and public transport, law enforcement," among others.
According to the City of Toronto, this is the first city to host such an event, though the example will soon be followed in Chicago and other North American cities.
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Steve Johnston, Senior Communications Coordinator, City of Toronto