The province's desire to…

The province's desire to remove bike lanes in the municipality of Toronto is an over reach. The urban planning for flow of motorist, cyclist and pedestrian traffic should be determined solely by the constituents of Toronto and elected officials of Toronto.

This policy is also largely based in conjecture as opposed to statistics or urban planning theory.

Time and time again it has been proven on a global scale that gridlock is reduced not by creating more lanes and motorways but by incentivizing people to simply NOT DRIVE. This is the exact purpose of the bike lanes in the proposed routes for their removal.

Likewise, should the Ontario government set a precedent for this, they will gain the audacity to pull further bike lanes into review. And conversely, should another party gain power, they may take it upon themselves to unilaterally ADD bike routes in municipalities around the province, which I also disagree with.

Attached to my comment you will find four documents - three are images of Bloor Street prior to the bike lane installation, and one is a 2022 election map of Toronto screenshot from https://results.elections.on.ca/en/graphics-charts

The election map is to demonstrate that the regions in which the bike routes are under review are ridings in which Doug Ford's PC Party did not even win the seat.

The images of Bloor make it clear - prior to the bike lane installation there were primarily two lanes of traffic on Bloor and two lanes of parking. Now, there are two lanes of traffic, two lanes of parking AND two lanes of cycling. While I understand the current layout of street parking and the bike lanes prohibits the oscillation of parking (ie, no parking between 7am-10am and 3pm-7pm to ensure four lanes of traffic), any congestion on Bloor Street will actually remain largely the same.

Likewise, the routes described (Bloor, Yonge, University) are largely traversed by cyclists commuting to businesses and employment, and subsidized by another form of transportation that is highly efficient and helps reduce vehicular congestion as well - it's called the subway.

The fact that the government wants to increase vehicular traffic SPECIFICALLY along routes that are already highly serviced by public transit is beyond me.

Lastly, the Bloor Street Pilot study in 2016 after the installation of the bike lane from Shaw to Avenue on Bloor determined the following data:

TRAFFIC DATA
- The average total traffic volumes on Bloor Street West decreased from approximately 24,300 per day prior to the bike lane to 20,000 per day (-16 per cent).
- There was modest diversion of traffic volumes, with an increase of seven per cent to Dupont Street (+1470) and four per cent to Harbord Street (+580). Overall traffic volumes across all three corridors were down three per cent (-1840).
- Six weeks after installation, travel times between Bay Street and Ossington Avenue initially increased by approximately four minutes eastbound in the morning peak period and approximately eight and a half minutes westbound in the afternoon peak period.
- Signal timing adjustments reduced the increases by half – the eastbound direction in the morning peak period was reduced to approximately two minutes and the increase in the westbound direction in the afternoon peak period was reduced to just over four minutes.

CYCLING DATA
- more people are cycling with a 56% increase after install
- safety improved for all users with a 44% decrease in all conflicts

ECONOMIC BENEFITS

Following the implementation of the Bloor Street Pilot Project in 2016, two separate studies of the corridor found positive economic impacts associated with the bikeway.

Key findings include:

increase in average number of customers
increase in customer spending
people who biked or walked spent more per month than those who drove or took transit

(Source: https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-transportation…)

In other words, the positive impacts included that cyclists were safer, spent more money on Bloor Street at the businesses than motorists, and despite seeing an increase by A FEW MINUTES during peak hours for driving on Bloor Street, and a slight increase in traffic on Harbord and Dupont, the overall amount of traffic on the road went down because more people were cycling.

Thank you for taking the time to review my comment.

Yours truly - a deeply concerned constituent of Ontario.