A cyclist advocacy organization is calling on the city to extend the Bloor Street bike lane to High Park Avenue, citing numbers that it says makes the existing route one of the busiest bike corridors in all of North America.

Cycle Toronto examined data from the City of Toronto that was collected at the intersection of Bloor Street and Markham Road in February 2018 and extrapolated the numbers to provide an estimate on the total volume of cyclists that have travelled through the area over the last year.

They pegged the number at more than 980,000, which they noted is comparable to the 1.13 million estimated trips on Vancouver’s Burrard Bridge in 2017. That route is believed to be the busiest dedicated bike lane in North America by volume, according to Cycle Toronto.

“This is now one of the busiest bikeways in North America, which is wild to think, that a 2.5 kilometre stub which is not really connected to a wider network is that popular. It is a sign of the times I think,” Cycle Toronto Executive Director Jared Kolb told CP24 on Wednesday.

The Bloor Street bike lane was put into place in 2016 and is second to only the Richmond and Adelaide street lanes in terms of total cyclist volume, though those separate lanes are counted as one cycling route by the city.

Right now the Bloor Street bike lane spans from Shaw Street to Avenue Road but Kolb said that he believes there is significant demand to extend it further west.

He said that Cycle Toronto conducted its own research at Bloor and Dufferin streets in September and found that there was 3,000 cyclists using the corridor on that day, despite chilly temperatures.

“Those numbers are similar to Bloor where the bike lanes are now but before they went in so there is a huge amount of latent demand,” he said.

Cycle Toronto is calling on the city to extend the Bloor Street bike lane to High Park Avenue by 2020.

The city estimates that there are about 4,900 cycling trips per day along the existing Bloor Street bike lane route.