Martin Goodman Trail

Best cycling path. Gets me to other side of the city or out to Mississauga /​Oakville.

love it, the lake shore is stunning, hope we have some nice café on the shore, but maybe its a good idea to minimize the commercial area

I do this trail a couple times a week and it’s a joy.
The least busy times are definitely 10am-​12noon. And worst is after work hours starting from 4pm till 7pm. But they do a great job of accommodating all the traffic even during peak hours. They’ve got lanes for bikers going both ways, designated pedestrian signals, and paths that are biker or pedestrian only.
You get mostly joggers, a lot of bikers and a few rollerbladers.
The view is gorgeous. At times, I forget that I’m only a couple miles from my home in Downtown TO. You have the seemingly never-​ending lake, rugged shoreline and beautiful islands in the distance.
Best way I know how to pretend I’m not in the city, even when I truly am.

A great little walk and by that I specially mean the 16−18km that goes along Toronto’s waterfront. Long and fun and quite interesting a true car safe environment where the chances of you getting hit a car a next to nil, unless one falls straight out of the sky… Which would imply that you really have much bigger problems than making sure you are getting enough vitamin D.
Whether you are two wheeled, a rollerblader or simply just biped, this is a great place to wander an afternoon away. Highly recommend. Just make sure to wear sunscreen.
Go try it out and get healthier!

The Martin Goodman trail was one of the first bicycle paths in Toronto. It’s named after a former editor at The Toronto Star. The western part of the trail is built along the path of the old Sunnyside boardwalk that was ripped up in the late 1950s, with the creation of the Gardiner Expressway.
The path is asphalt, and is a fairly wide bi-​directional path that goes uninterrupted from the Humber River, in the west, to the foot of Bathurst Street, in the east. In between are some of the nicest waterfront areas in the city, including Ontario Place. Between the Palais Royale (bottom of Roncesvalles Avenue) and the Humber River, there is a separate boardwalk for pedestrians, though you will find a mixture of joggers, walkers, and inline-​rollerbladers sharing the path.
A plus for year-​round cyclists, like myself, is that the path is plowed during the winter. I would give this path five-​stars, except pedestrians on the path between the Humber River and the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion (bottom of Colbourne Lodge Road), sometimes turn this route into an unsafe obstacle course during the beginning of the warm weather season, and sometimes in the summer.
During the summer months, definitely a great way to spend an afternoon or early evening is to go for a bike ride along the path, and then finish it up with a beer on the beach-​front patio at the Sunnyside Pavilion. I ride this path more often than my profile shows.

The Martin Goodman Trail is great to explore on your bicycle: it goes from one end of Toronto (the pre-​megacity Toronto, anyway) to the other following the lakefront, for the most part. It’s reasonably flat (except for a hill just west of Ontario Place) and most of it is dedicated to bicycles, rollerbladers, and pedestrians, though some stretches overlap with city streets and aren’t marked well.
The best parts are: the western beaches, from the Humber pedestrian bridge to Ontario Place; Coronation Park; Cherry Beach; and the eastern beaches, from Ashbridge’s Bay to just short of Victoria Park Avenue.
Sections to avoid are: The area around Ontario Place; Queen’s Quay, where the bike lane disappears; and the industrial stretches along Cherry Street and Leslie Street.