This is a bad law and…

This is a bad law and regulation, for several reasons, and I oppose it. Bundling removing and banning bike lanes with exempting a freeway from environmental assessment is a blatant attempt at politicking and creating a wedge issue to shift the conversation and hide the real goal of the law. Discouraging bike lanes disregards existing data and disregards best practices in urban design from around the world, and it considers the time, wellbeing, safety, and health of anyone not in an automobile to be worth nothing.

Here's only a few of the considerations from provincial point of view:

On a practical level:

- This adds provincial red tape to matters that the province has delegated to municipalities.

- This mixes governmental responsibilities. If the Ministry of Transportation wants a say in how streets operate, an obvious answer would be to assume the streets as provincial property and responsibility. Yet, this act does not provide for the Ministry to pay for increased road maintenance that will be required due to increased automobile volumes.

- This sets up a game of cat and mouse with municipal governments. We've seen that municipal governments are very good at putting up creative barriers to provincial policies, for example on the housing file. Municipalities will be able to take other actions, not proscribed here, to reduce vehicle throughput. Now instead of converting car lanes to bike lanes, they'll convert car lanes to parking lanes, or set a really low speed limit, or put a stop sign or traffic light on every block, or set up modal filters to remove through traffic from streets. Is the Ministry of Transportation prepared to check every change to every street in Ontario?

- This might have an unintended consequence of municipalities avoiding widening any streets or roads, fearing they won't be able to adjust them ever again.

On an ideological level:

- What is the purpose of the Environmental Assessment Act if we exempt projects from assessment? Is it only for projects the government doesn't like?

- Some of the worst congested highways in Ontario are provincial highways like the QEW and the 401. Congestion on the 401 is legendary. The QEW is newly clogged through Hamilton and Burlington due to failures of provincial transportation policy and planning. Having failed to keep provincial highways free of congestion, the province now wants to use our main streets as highways.

- Outside of 400-series highways, some of the worst congestion in the GTA is on streets that have no bike lanes and no road safety changes. These are areas such as around Square One in Mississauga or around Yorkdale in Toronto. Why are these not a focus for the province, rather than three specific streets in central Toronto?

- It is unclear why the Ministry of Transportation is taking on more responsibilities considering their failures on the freeway file, and their current problems delivering projects like the Crosstown LRT (now at least half a decade late with no opening date set). Why does it need more responsibilities?

- Why is this a priority for the government during the week that province announced that it is not meeting its own housing starts goal? Which do we need more, homes or cars?

- If the province wants to see municipal data before making a decision, how come a decision has been made already for Bloor, Yonge, and University? Which data has the province seen there to make this decision?

50 years ago, the Progressive Conservative Premier Bill Davis stated about a proposed expressway: "If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop."

Is Ontario interested in building transportation to serve people, or to serve the automobile?