I strongly oppose this…

I strongly oppose this proposed legislation. It is not an example of "common sense" but rather knee-jerk reactionism. The reasons why I don't support this legislation include:

In relation to bike lanes:
- The governments use of misleading facts on bike lanes. For example the 1.2% of people commuting by bike figure includes areas well outside of Toronto, the number is higher in the city.
- Bikes lanes don't cause an increase in emergency response times, EMS in Toronto confirmed this. Besides look at Europe and how bike lanes are designed to accommodate emergency vehicles giving them car free lanes. There are solutions to these concerns.
- You can't judge the need for a bridge by the number of people swimming across a river. People don't ride because the infrastructure is bad and they don't feel safe. There are numerous examples of cities building new bike infrastructure seeing huge increases in ridership.
- Putting bike lanes on side streets ignores the fact that people are riding to get somewhere - side streets do not offer an efficient means to get from one place to another.
- Bike lanes have higher capacities than car lanes, therefore building the lanes and getting more people riding can reduce traffic.
- It increases red-tape and removes local control.

In relation to 413:
- We have an under-used highway we could use instead.
- The impact on the environment and communities it goes through will be huge.
- It will cause more sprawl.
- Induced demand means it will fill up in the nottoo-distant future.
- Mass transit (i.e. trains) are far more efficient in moving people.

We have had decades of car-centric planning and traffic keeps getting worse and worse. It's time to do something different. This bill just continues the same policies that are failing.