Trips under 5km my ass, 17k a day is normal! City of Toronto better wake up.

When people are like "you biked here?!?" their look of shock, I love it :D "wow you're a real serious cyclist then" that kind of bums me out a bit, because basically they're saying "I'm not doing that."

Anyway. This "trips under 5km" bullshit has got to stop. The city keeps pushing it and it's a great excuse to keep the junctions between our 'hoods impassible. Like these pieces of garbage:

Those are your choices if you want to cross this one set of train tracks, anywhere between Ray and Dundas. That's a 6km wide barrier to cyclists going east-west through the west end. Thanks a lot, City of Toronto! We know you hate us but what is so offensive about us crossing your tracks?

This is the end result of all this "trips under 5k talk." Limiting our trips to 5k, and the 5k that the city decides to allow us to work within!

So what are police telling cyclists when we go in to ask what the safest legal way to get through these spots is? Well, they're telling us to bike through them really slowly on the sidewalk and yield to pedestrians. As in, treat the sidewalks like any of the multi-use "trails" (think ravine paths) where traffic is too fast to mix with, and where the sidewalks are too narrow to walk your bike past pedestrians coming the other way.

Have fun here at Scarlett and Dundas, where if they'd just get rid of the jersey barrier there, we'd have a space to bike through next to the cars, or if the sidewalk was wider, we could walk our bikes through... at the moment, what is the expectation of cyclists? There fucking IS NONE!

As if being a cyclist in the junction weren't offensive enough, if you want to go northwest, and you're not using Runnymede, hell, even if you are using Runnymede, good luck!

Once again I'm supposed to bike through this twice a day every day when drivers have nothing keeping them from passing each-other and running me over. Right. We got a space that's perfect width for one driver to pass another, and we're just gonna trust them with paint. We protect our fucking grass better than this!

Things we protect better than cyclists:

We protect grass better than we protect cyclists.

We protect the pedestrians of this particular alley with great vigilance!

We protect fences better than we protect cyclists.

We protect dirt better than we protect cyclists.

And our bridge pillars? Better believewe protect them better than cyclists! In fact, you could bike through there if those pillars weren't so vulnerable that they needed a curb AND metal railings. For this two-lane road.

We even protect newspapers better than we protect cyclists.

We fucking protect literally fucking empty space better than we protect cyclists.

I know gas lines need protection, but gas lines aren't in somebody's way when they're trying to turn. I am! And they know they can get away with running me over. Why do I not need the same amount of protection? How many people do we lose to gas explosions in the city every year compared to drivers running over cyclists? This is fucking stupid.

I'm done. This is fucking dumb.