Harbord gets more bike boxes and a sharrows compromise

Toronto's got some more bike boxes. After the first example of this infrastructure went in at St. George and Harbord about a month ago, new additions have now popped up at Spadina and Harbord and Queen's Park and Hoskin. This makes for quite the little cluster around U of T, which due to the high volume of cyclists in the area , strikes me as a pretty good place to introduce the new infrastructure.

In other news related to cycling infrastructure around Harbord, the "missing" bike lane between Borden and Spadina has been (sort of) addressed with the addition of sharrows last week, though it's anybody's guess if these will help with cyclist safety much. It's all pretty tight along this strip (especially from Spadina to Brunswick). Driving along the street earlier today, I was struck by just how narrow the spaces allotted for parked cars are. Not just a pain for drivers, such cramped spaces invited cyclist-to-door collisions (everyone's favourite kind).

There have been numerous calls to connect the Harbord bike lanes, including some guerrilla work by the Urban Repair Squad, but it appears that sharrows is the compromise cyclists will have to make do with (unless the URS has something else planned for the street).

I didn't snap any photos of the new developments along Harbord, but Martin Reis has a couple of Flickr sets that illustrate what the street looks like now. He also notes, quite rightly, that these sharrows are not listed on the Toronto Bikeways project list for 2010, which suggests that the City has acknowledged the need to bridge the gap, but refused to budge on removing on-street parking in the area.

Check out the slideshow below for a look at the sharrows and follow this link for more shots of the new bike boxes.

Lead photo by Martin Reis.