If you are a cyclist and you are peeved at the lack of bicycle lanes, or the pesky way some of them stop and start again, who do you blame?

Chances are, if you live in a downtown ward, your city councillor likes to have his or her picture taken in a bike helmet. The mayor does too.

Scarborough City Councillor Adrian Heaps, chairman of the city's cycling committee, has worked to streamline the approvals needed to build bike lanes, stripping the ability to delay them from the mostly suburban councillors who tend to oppose them, in exchange for promising not to force lanes into their wards. He has promised 50 kilometres of new bike lanes this year. If they don't materialize, I suppose you could blame him.

But it may be that we cyclists - and the activists who claim to represent us - should also share the blame, since Toronto has dragged its feet for so long, building only a fraction of the 500 kilometres of new bike lanes that were supposed to be finished by 2006, despite the proliferation of new riders and activist groups.

While it is tiring to read another column saying Toronto needs to be more like (insert major global city here), in this case, Toronto's bike activists need to become more like New York's.

Leave aside the recent YouTube clip of a New York cop bodychecking a cyclist during a Critical Mass pro-bike protest: The real message from the Big Apple is that bike activists need to go professional.

New York activists with the 35-year-old group Transportation Alternatives have been staggeringly successful at not just fighting for bike lanes in a city that has tended to be naturally hostile to pedal-pushers, but in advocating for other cutting-edge transportation policies as well, such as Mayor Michael Bloomberg's dead (for now) congestion charge plan.

Noah Budnick - the group's deputy director who on a recent visit here addressed local activists and Metrolinx, the provincial agency working on a transportation plan for the Toronto region - said in an interview that even progressive political leaders need "gentle prodding" from well-organized grassroots groups, and they need to be praised when they do something positive, however small.

Compared to the swelling ranks of well-meaning but part-time activists we have in Toronto, his group is much, much better at that "gentle prodding," with political-party-like fundraising appeals, phone banks, original research and 18 paid staff. It has 6,000 members and a budget of $1.5-million (U.S.), with cash from big donors and private foundations.

Mr. Budnick, who lost two weeks of his memory after a harrowing bike crash in 2005, spoke at a Toronto event organized by the U.S. consulate and two of Toronto's newest bike advocacy groups, which are aiming to emulate his group's success. Both have a long way to go.

In Toronto, the promising Toronto Cyclists Union is still just getting off the ground, with a $5,000 grant from the local Harbinger Foundation, which funds mostly non-governmental groups. The Cyclists Union says it has 350 paying members so far, who can either join for $24 a year or with a $500 lifetime membership. Its spokespeople have already started showing up at city hall.

The Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation boasts support from numerous cycling groups and agencies and has produced a smattering of useful reports although its output has stalled a bit this year. The Cyclists Union's Yvonne Bambrick said Mr. Budnick's example of pragmatic activism is an inspiration: "They've mobilized. They've made it cool. ... He's doing stuff that we're already doing but he's doing it on a scale that is reaching way more people and having way more impact."