New bike lanes on Jarvis are painted and ready for use, and the former reversible centre car lane is gone. Naturally, motorists aren't pleased by the perceived negative impacts on traffic congestion, and cyclists are pleased with the convenient and much safer city riding option. The City won't be dedicating any resources to measuring the actual effects of the change until the fall (because in the summer, vehicular traffic is up to 20% lighter than peak). Shouldn't the impact studies include all seasons of the year? I suppose it wouldn't be fair to cyclists to measure the impacts of the change on cyclists in say, January (because in the winter bike traffic is probably down 95% from peak).

A teen up in Owen Sound has been charged with careless driving after being involved in an accident while he was riding his bike. Police claim that the teen was distracted as he was texting on his cellphone while cycling, inadvertently hit a parked car, was thrown from his bike and smashed the back window of the vehicle. Oops.

While a stretch of the Danforth between Greenwood Avenue and Monarch Park does have 11 Ethopian restaurants, the Danforth-Mosaic BIA isn't likely to support calls to have the area officially designated "Little Ethiopia." It's too diverse an area to be labelled such (and perhaps some parts of the stretch on Bloor between Christie Pits and Lansdowne might also be a contender for that title).

A Barrie woman is facing theft charges after allegedly stealing clothing from a store. She was easily tracked down by police because at the time of the alleged theft she was also dropping off her resume in hopes of securing a job at that same store. I'm not sure if this incident shouts desperation or stupidity or both.

Early adopters with fat wallets will be lining up at Toronto-area Apple stores on Friday morning. The iPhone 4 will be available for sale for the first time in Canada -- without a contract with one of our mobile service providers. To buy a phone without contractual agreement won't be cheap though (the 16GB model will be priced at $659, and the 32GB model set at $779). Pricing with contracts from Bell, Rogers, and Telus have not yet been announced but will likely be based on 3-year minimum contracts (if we're lucky they won't try to lock us into 10-year contracts, which they probably could do if they pleased).

Photo: "One hot Toronto summer" by karon.liu, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.