Mayor Rob Ford may have declared the war on the car over but the battle on the streets may just be beginning.

Just ask cyclist Vincent McMillen, who says he’s been “nicked” by cars twice in the last week.

“I was riding through an intersection, and this driver misjudged their timing as they pulled out onto the street as I passed,” he says. “They hit my back wheel, and I spun out and scraped up my leg on the road.”

McMillen’s tale captures the frustration and fear felt by cyclists and arguably all street users.

“Drivers think we’re making their lives more difficult,” he says. “We have to share the road — they just have to deal with that.”

Star columnist Judith Timson recently captured the anger on the streets, when she commented that as a driver she’s had enough of cyclists breaking the law and endangering motorists and pedestrians.

“We are in the wild west of road sharing in this, the age of ‘the rules are not for me,’ the age of instant gratification,” she wrote.

But on social media, the column unleashed a torrent of outrage from cyclists who felt they had been made a scapegoat in Toronto’s commuting turf war.

“Strange your piece mentions everyone breaks the law, but singles out cyclists as real danger. Yet they don’t kill millions/yr,” tweeted one Toronto cyclist.

So what would it take to get us talking and listening to each other? It won’t be easy and it will take time. McMillen fears people may be killed before things will truly improve. Others say the change is underway but will take time and come one step at a time.

Last week, the city’s board of health met to discuss a series of bike safety recommendations put forward in a report by Toronto’s chief health officer, Dr. David McKeown.

They include: the need for more separated bike lanes, reducing speed limits, developing a bike safety course as part of the provincial elementary and high school curriculum, including information in the Ontario Driver’s Manual on how to share the road safely with cyclists, asking police to start monitoring “ dooring ” collisions and conducting monthly towing blitzes for bicycle lanes.

The city report states that more than 1,000 cyclists a year are injured in collisions with motor vehicles, and in 2010 a third of these collisions led to hospital visits.

Dr. Monica Campbell, one of the report’s authors and a director of public health with the city, is hopeful McMillen’s grim prediction will be wrong.

“The safety of cycling has actually improved over the last decade,” she says. “The number of people in Toronto who reported cycling as their means of commuting increased by 20 per cent, and the rate of fatalities has actually come down.”

But she warns that any infrastructure changes won’t happen overnight.

“Amsterdam didn’t always look the way that it does now,” says Campbell. “A few decades ago it was a lot more like Toronto, a lot more travelled by car.”

“So that city through significant investment in cycling infrastructure has evolved, and so I think there’s tremendous potential in Toronto to emulate that.”

Amsterdam is always held up as a cyclist’s utopia. It is a city where bicycles outnumber people 881,000 to 799,000 — a city where there are only 263,000 cars.

For Amsterdam, the turning point appears to be 1971, when motor vehicles deaths in the Netherlands reached record levels — 3,300 fatalities, 500 of them children.

The toll prompted a series of grassroots protests under the banner Stop de Kindermoord (Stop the Child Murder), aimed at pressuring the Dutch government to make streets safer for everyone.

The government responded with plans to demotorize its cities, improve public transit and create a comprehensive network of bike lanes on busy roads and between urban areas. It created the woonerf (“living space”), to describe a street that puts the needs of pedestrians and cyclists ahead of vehicles.

The Netherlands now has thousands of woonerfs. Toronto has just begun building its first in the West Don Lands.

Today, Amsterdam has more than 400 kilometres of bike paths, and more than 900 kilometres of city roads have restricted speed limits to protect cyclists. In schools, 80 per cent of Grade 6 students take a cycling exam.

Limon Tahira, a spokesperson for the city, says the number of cyclists in Amsterdam has increased by 40 per cent in just the last four years

“We do still have congestion but it would be far worse if everyone drove,” says Tahira. “But right now about 58 per cent of Amsterdammers choose to cycle to work.”

Cycling and, more importantly, street safety have become ingrained in the Dutch culture. A 2013 Canadian study reported that North American cyclists are eight to 30 times more likely to be seriously injured while cycling than their European counterparts.

Lead author Anne Harris, a Ryerson University professor, said Canadian cities must emulate the Amsterdam model to reduce that discrepancy: cut vehicle speeds and put in more segregated bicycle lanes. She said this will have a beneficial ripple effect.

“If people see cycling as a safer activity they would be more encouraged to commute by bike,” said Harris. “This in turn makes them more active and healthy citizens.

“There’s not only a safety-in-numbers feeling when you’re out cycling. But there’s also the theory that if you’re a cyclist yourself, you’re more respectful of fellow cyclists when you do have to drive a car.”

Harris said Toronto lags behind other cities in the building of separated bicycling infrastructure. “We need to do something soon because the volume of people that are moving within the GTA is only increasing.”

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Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, chair of the works and infrastructure committee, admits Toronto can do more, “but we’re already spending more on cycling infrastructure since we got elected, than the last government spent in four.

“At $44 million, we’re spending twice as much as a supposedly pro-cycling mayor did.”

In addition to the recent opening of a dedicated cycling lane on Sherbourne St., the city will be constructing additional lanes on Richmond and Adelaide Sts., he said.

“In this whole debate, it’s far too easy to see the cup as half empty. For many cyclists, there will never be enough bike lanes.”

Cyclist McMillen isn’t ashamed to admit that’s exactly what he’d like to see.

“Bike lanes are a fantastic idea and I hope they’d be put everywhere in the city,” he said. “There used to be a bike lane on Jarvis St. and for some reason they decided to take it away and move it to Sherbourne — that cost us all a lot of money.”

Last October, city council voted to remove the $59,000 bike lanes to restore a reversible fifth lane, at a cost of $300,000, to improve commute times for drivers.

Minnan-Wong defended the decision, saying that realistically bike lanes can’t go on every street.

“Cars on the streets are just a reality in the city, congestion is terrible, and we have to protect the north-south route that motorists use to get in and out of the downtown. If you’re driving north you have very limited options.

“So it made no sense to me to use a primary corridor, like Jarvis, to have a bike lane.”

Even the South Central Ontario branch of the Canadian Automobile Association agrees more bike lanes are needed.

“After all, many of our two million members are also cyclists,” says spokeswoman Faye Lyons.

Dylan Reid, co-founder of the pro-pedestrian website Walk Toronto , said the city is doing its best to mediate a peaceful resolution to the turf war by adopting the woonerf concept where different modes of transport can coexist.

“Their Complete Streets policy is addressing how we can share Toronto’s streets equally amongst pedestrians, cyclists and motorists and accommodate everybody.”

The strategy plays down the idea we’re all jockeying for space in the city and seeks to find a middle ground, Reid said.

And in a city that has about two million more residents than Amsterdam, these are admittedly logistical headaches that Dutch city planners haven’t had to face.

Amsterdam, a seventeenth century city with many narrow winding lanes made for the horse and carriage, is better suited to a network of bike lanes compared to Toronto’s grid system of asphalt arteries.

Last October, the Dutch city issued a report outlining the need to improve its infrastructure to contend with the burgeoning number of cyclists on its roads. Bike lanes will be widened, the timing of traffic lights adjusted and about 38,000 parking spaces created at a cost of 57 million euros ($77 million).

McMillen, for one, is not optimistic things will change any time soon in Toronto.