What is Happy Trails?

What are the multi-use trails of the GTA?

The Greater Toronto Area has roughly 400 kilometres of multi-use trail and about 240 kilometres of bike lane. Multi-use trails are paved, separated from traffic, and open to walkers, joggers, cyclists and wheelchairs alike.

Most of them exist in ravines and along hydro corridors — the land that was never suitable for building on. The Beltline follows a defunct railway; the Waterfront Trail follows the lake. Both have had real investment recently.

This project is about trails, not bike lanes. Trails are for recreation and exercise as much as transport, and they are underused, largely because the network is broken into pieces by development, highways, railways and — more than people expect — golf courses, which take up over 2,000 acres in the GTA and keep the public out of riparian land.

Why not just use Google Maps?

Google Maps is a poor guide for a cyclist here: trails missing, trails mislabelled, and paths marked that you cannot actually ride. Mount Pleasant Cemetery is the clearest example — what is drawn there does not match what you can do on the ground.

What about the Toronto Cycling Map?

The official cycling map marks the trails clearly in orange and is a real improvement on Google. But it is a static PDF rather than something you can interrogate — Montréal's equivalent is far better in that respect — and neither of them explains why the network is in pieces.

The goal

Happy Trails is a map and an infographic at once, meant to be readable whether you ride every day or have never been on a trail. Beyond showing where the trails are, it shows what stops them joining up, and proposes what would fix it.

That is what the Wishful Thinking layer is for: switch it on from the main map and the proposed connections appear alongside the built ones.

What the future holds

Getting to a coherent network means undoing a century of encroachment into the ravines. Some of it is straightforward: eleven of the eighteen golf courses in the city are city-owned, and could simply be required to permit a bypass.

Bigger projects are already moving — the East Don River trail, and the rehabilitation of the Meadoway across Scarborough. The proposals in Wishful Thinking are ambitious, but none of them is fanciful. They are what a city that took active transport seriously would build.

Awareness lags well behind what is already on the ground. A good deal of the network is better than people think it is, and getting more people onto it matters as much as extending it.

The trails in 2026

The trails grew out of informal walking paths, and were built neighbourhood by neighbourhood rather than as a network. That is why the design, the signage and the accessibility are so inconsistent from one stretch to the next.

The network is now at the point where the remaining obstacles are the big ones — highways, railways, golf courses. Clearing them is what turns a collection of trails into something worth more than the sum of its parts.

Who am I?

Someone who cycles a lot, got frustrated with the maps and with the state of some of the trails, and made this. Toronto is entirely capable of world-class trail infrastructure: beautiful, accessible, and joined up.

If you want to get in touch, the contact page is the place.