Toronto has set ambitious goals around active transportation, but a comparison with peer cities reveals a significant gap between those goals and what cyclists actually encounter on city streets. The fragmented network of bike lanes — interrupted by parked cars, missing connections, and abrupt dead ends — continues to discourage the kind of everyday cycling that is routine in cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and even Montreal.
The fundamental difference between Toronto and high-cycling cities is not culture — it is infrastructure. In cities where cycling rates are high, the infrastructure came first. Protected bike lanes separated from traffic by physical barriers, coherent networks that connect residential neighbourhoods to employment and transit hubs, and streets designed with the understanding that cyclists are not a niche category but a primary mode of transportation. Toronto's cycling network, while growing, still struggles to provide this level of coherence across the city.
The Network Gap
One of the most persistent critiques of Toronto's cycling infrastructure is its lack of connectivity. A cyclist travelling from a residential neighbourhood in the east end to downtown may encounter several kilometres of protected or painted bike lanes, only to find them ending without warning at a busy intersection — forcing a transition onto a multilane arterial road. This kind of fragmentation is not merely inconvenient; it is a barrier that keeps many potential cyclists off the road entirely.
Cities that have successfully built cycling cultures typically did so by investing in network completeness before worrying about coverage area. In other words, a smaller but fully connected network is more useful — and safer — than a larger network with gaps. Toronto's current approach has produced quantity of lane-kilometres without always ensuring that those kilometres connect meaningfully to each other.
Equity and Access
The geography of cycling infrastructure in Toronto is also uneven. Inner-city neighbourhoods, particularly in the downtown core, have seen significant investment in recent years. Meanwhile, many suburban areas — where cycling could offer real transportation value for residents who face longer waits for transit — have been passed over. This imbalance means that the people who might benefit most from cycling infrastructure are often the people who have the least access to it.
For lower-income households, cycling can represent a meaningful reduction in transportation costs. A household that can safely commute by bicycle avoids the cost of transit fares or car ownership. But that option is only genuinely available when the infrastructure makes cycling safe and practical — conditions that do not yet exist in many parts of the city.
What Other Cities Have Done
The comparisons to Amsterdam or Copenhagen are sometimes dismissed as unfair given those cities' different scale and urban form. But Montreal offers a closer analogy: a Canadian city with harsh winters, a similar density in its core, and a cycling mode share that significantly outpaces Toronto's. The key difference is sustained, multi-decade investment in a coherent protected network, combined with a political culture that treats cycling infrastructure as essential rather than optional.
Paris has added hundreds of kilometres of protected cycling infrastructure in recent years as part of a deliberate effort to reduce car traffic. Seville went from negligible cycling rates to over 7% mode share within a decade of building a dedicated protected network. These cities demonstrate that rapid progress is possible when there is a clear commitment to infrastructure investment.
The Path Forward
Toronto's cycling network will not be transformed overnight, but the direction matters as much as the pace. Priorities should include filling existing gaps in the network to create continuous protected routes, extending infrastructure into underserved areas of the city, and ensuring that cycling lanes provide genuine protection — not just painted lines in the door zone of parked cars.
The City of Toronto has published cycling infrastructure plans that set targets for network expansion. Progress against those targets, and the quality of what gets built, will determine whether Toronto can eventually claim to be a genuinely cycling-friendly city rather than one that is simply working toward it. For campaigns like Your32, the goal is to ensure that community voices remain part of that process — and that the pressure to keep improving does not fade when the next budget cycle comes around.
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