Personal Review
My take on this ride.
Ride It at Night
You can ride Yonge Street any time of day. You should ride it at dusk.
What changes at that hour is everything. The light drops. The street lamps come on one by one, illuminating the roads in long amber corridors. The sky goes to that colour between blue and black above the rooflines, and the city shifts into a different breathing pattern. Daytime Toronto moves with purpose – commuters, errands, the transactional energy of a city getting things done. At dusk, the rhythm changes. The urgency drains out and something else replaces it. The working day ends and you can feel the people around you breaking off the tension of the daily grind, spilling out of office buildings, settling into patios, the city's evening self emerging around you.
At night, Yonge Street is a different city. The daytime version is busy and ordinary. The dusk version is cinematic.
Sixteen Kilometres of Toronto
Yonge and Finch. You hop on your bike. The ride stretches south, 16 kilometres of city waiting to reveal itself. Korean restaurants, the particular energy of North York's Koreatown, the smell of grilled meat and kimchi-jjigae drifting from open doors. The city feels alive here. There's wide intersections, crowds of people buzzing about, and restaurants everywhere.
Then the descent. Sheppard to York Mills. The road drops away beneath you, not a gradual slope but a sustained, committed descent that builds speed faster than you expect. Cars exiting the 401 Highway in awe as you match their speed. Your hands find the brakes, and you hold them for dear life. This is the moment the ride becomes thrilling.
Midtown. Lawrence to Eglinton. This is the quaint, human-scaled section – independent shops, cafés with patio chairs on the sidewalk, the neighbourhood feeling of a city that still has neighbourhoods. Yonge Street narrows slightly here, feels more intimate. It's a gentle reminder that Toronto, for all its ambition, is still assembled from small pieces.
As you enter the core, the buildings get taller. The streets get busier. Somewhere around Bloor, Toronto stops feeling like a city and starts feeling like a downtown. The downhill element lets you cruise through and take in the scene. Dundas Square at night is sensory overload in the best way. The energy is different here. Faster, louder, more concentrated. You're not passing through neighbourhoods anymore. You're inside the machine.
And then the finish. Queens Quay. The lake opens up ahead of you, flat and dark if you're riding at dusk, the city stacked behind you, and the particular satisfaction of having crossed it entirely on two wheels. The land runs out. The ride is over. You've been everywhere.
Worth Knowing
There's a subway running beneath you right now
Canada's first subway line opened beneath Yonge Street in 1954. It runs directly under the road for most of this ride, Finch to Union, the same corridor, the same direction. While you're above ground at night moving through street lamps and lit windows, there's a train making the same journey underneath you in the dark.
The subway gets you there in 30 minutes. The bike takes an hour and shows you every metre of what the subway skips.
