Linking routes in western Toronto

Yesterday’s route in green

After work yesterday, I took advantage of the Bloor bike lanes prior to their removal and connected some disconnected tracks in the west of the city. I rode all the way to where the bike lanes end at Kipling, then took Dundas West northeast to where it splits: with St. Clair Avenue north of the rail lines and Dundas south. I took St. Clair to Prospect Cemetery, and then the familiar route north up the cemetery and then east along the York Beltline and Kay Gardiner Beltline trails.

Bad weather projected for Thursday has the Neon Ride delayed until Friday, and I am also talking with friends about a daylong ride north up the Humber ravine to the arboretum.

Pandemic walks extentification project

My pandemic walks project has involved a lot of densification: trying to exhaustively make use of all possible routes within a geographic area, acting as a kind of human radioactive tracer running through the city’s circulatory system.

This has been interesting and has led to some nice still and animated art.

At the same time, the whole project was motivated in part by the desire to avoid visiting and re-visiting the same areas during the pandemic. That, combined with pleasant spring weather, has me thinking about reorienting from densification toward extentification, both undertaking new rides to expand the total area explored and working to add days with over 100 km of riding.

I made some maps to get a sense of how long it would take to get beyond the explored region. I added lines to show the distances to places on the outermost edges of the explored area and, in parentheses, added the Google Maps bicycle travel times there from Brentwood Towers:

(Sorry the travel times are glitched in the final map; I wanted to make all the lines the same colour and accidentally overwrote the manual Google Maps travel times labels.)

These maps show only analog / mechanical / acoustic bicycle trips, including my year on Bike Share Toronto, my Dutch bike, and the loaner I used while it was being serviced.

I need to go a long way in most directions to get beyond the network: 10–15 km in most directions. The most direct route to new kilometres is northeast, through the Bridle Path and into the areas east of the northwestern branches of the Don.

The 10,000 milli-amp-hour portable phone battery which I bought for the 2015 CUPE 3902 TA strike at U of T had started bulging, so I replaced it. I should be set for day-long extentification weekend excursions now.

P.S. I figured out how to do this in a more automated way using QGIS. First, here is the area of all the rides converted into convex hulls:

And here is a set of automatically-generated spokes radiating in all directions from the centre point of all my rides (which is predictably enough right between home and work):

The only buggy element is how it projects spokes out into the lake. Nonetheless, this provides a useful visual guide to how far I need to go to get beyond my total area explored so far by bike.

Cherry blossom season-starter

Last night, the Neon Riders began their 2025 season with a tour of Toronto’s varied blooming cherry blossoms:

These rides are one of the definite high points of my week. Riding in a large group is a totally different experience from riding in the city alone — as long as you are not at the edges you barely need to worry about cars, which is an inversion of the normal city cycling experience, and the rides are fundamentally social since you are always surrounded by people who you can speak to easily and naturally.

Plus, there are bike dogs:

Judo instructors recognized

I had to stop going because I kept bruising my ribs and injuring my joints, but the Hart House Judo Club is pretty great — especially when you consider that all the senseis work for free and donate the mandatory class fees for club social events.

I was heartened to see that senseis Jorge, Bernard, and Izidor were granted the U of T Arbor Award for their exemplary volunteerism.

Sprained

Though the trip was excellent, a combination of having too much to pack in and pack out along with an unlucky trip over a root in the dark has left me with a sprained ankle and off my bicycle.

That will make this weekend’s photo gig in Montreal especially challenging, due to the long days and substantial amount of heavy gear to lug.

I hope I will be back to biking soon: both to catch the remaining group bike rides of the season, and to avoid the inconvenience, lost sleep, and cost of relying on public transit.