I completely oppose Bill 212…

I completely oppose Bill 212. The bill is a complete over-reach of legislative authority, poorly thought out, not based in facts or reality. The bill will make the lives of all Ontarians worse environmentally (destroying sensitive lands, species loss, farmland lost, decreasing local food production, etc.) and financially (subsidizing more urban sprawl, taking on more debt to pay for highways, etc.), and less safe (faster speeds, fewer safe roads to bike on, etc.).

As a driver, the government should be focusing on making our streets safer by restricting vehicle size and weight, as well as maximum speed and acceleration. Heavier vehicles wear out our roads faster which means more costly, congestion inducing construction on a more frequent basis. Heavier vehicles and faster moving vehicles also result in more severe injuries; the combination of the two factors is deadly.

As a driver, I wish that the government would instead restrict the size of vehicles too make more room on the roads for additional vehicle traffic. The average vehicle size in 2013 was 4.45m, but by 2023 that had increased to 5.00m. That means that in a 1km stretch of road you can fit 25 fewer vehicles than just 10 years ago. The result is that on 40kph road, such as Bloor St, 1,005 fewer vehicles per hour can flow through the same stretch of road just on increased vehicle size alone. The over-sized pickups and SUVs have no place in our province unless needed for professional purposes (but even that is a lie, tradespeople in the rest of the world get along fine with smaller vehicles that are more practical and with better visibility).

As a driver, I wish the government were serious about clearing up congestion and ban on-street parking EVERYWHERE, all of the time, and require that if on-street parking were allowed that vehicle owners be charge the FULL and TRUE cost of parking. The public subsidization of private property (vehicle) storage needs to end. We do not allow people to store their clothes in our water pipes, and we certainly would not let them do it for less than the full cost of maintaining that pipe. I can’t store the contents of my garage on the road, why should I be allowed to store my vehicle? Especially when it is impeding and reducing the flow of traffic.

The BUILDING HIGHWAYS FASTER ACT and HIGHWAY 413 ACT are not needed because we need to stop building new highways, and stop widening existing highways; especially when there is a completely underused highway 407 that could be better used. We are in a climate crisis and building new highways will only increase emissions (both from construction and road material production, but from more congestion and more kilometres driven). The 407 could be bought and its tolls removed essentially overnight for a fraction of the cost of a new highway (and unlike a 413 would be completed immediately not a minimum 15 years from now). Tolls could be placed on other roads and highways to shift demand away from congested routes.

Study after study, and city after city, have shown that bike lanes do not cause congestion. Bike lanes are a part of the solution. Part of the issue is that the government is using the wrong metrics. Roads are meant to move PEOPLE and GOODS, not VEHICLES AND GOODS. So instead of measuring number of VEHICLES moved per hour the better metric would be the number of PEOPLE moved per hour. By measuring by that metric then bike lanes, bus lanes, transit lines, etc. improve those metrics most AND get people out of their cars leaving more space on the roads for others who want or need to drive. People need viable, safe options. As a driver I prefer when roads have dedicated and separate space for motor vehicles and bicycles. It makes both drivers and people who bike much more predictable, and yes, it often forces drivers to slow down. Just because someone used to be able to “get across town in 15min”, does not mean that they should have been able to do so. It just means that previously they were excessively speeding, and are now the being forced to travel the speed limit.

Requiring Ministry approval for a bike lane is the opposite of red-tape reduction; it is unnecessarily bureaucratic. Limiting a municipality from even marking (painting) a bicycle lane is also extremely petty and vindictive. You are telling me a municipality that has a 5m wide lane and wants to paint a line to denote 1.5m of it is now for bicycles and leave 3.5m for cars needs Ministry approval because it “might” unduly diminish the orderly movement of motor vehicle traffic?

The government should also legislate that all self-driving vehicle features should be able to communicate seamlessly across makes, models, and manufacturers. This will allow for vehicles to travel closer together, at faster speeds, with greater safety and efficiency than an unpredictable human driver.

New and wider roads are only going to exacerbate and accelerate the impacts on our climate. More and wider roads only induces demand. We are at the point where congestion is a geometry problem. We simply cannot fit any more vehicles into our city cores. We should be focusing on how to reinvigorate our rail lines to rely less of truck shipping, how we can re-establish industry closer to our cities so that we don’t need to ship things across the globe, but make them closer to home.

The government should also launch an investigation into why infrastructure projects in Ontario (highways, transit, water, etc.) are so much more expensive and slower than in the rest of the world. There must be illegal collusion and price fixing involved.

Given that the government just spent $100 million dollars on satellite internet the portion of the bill pertaining to amending the BUILDING BROADBAND FASTER ACT, 2021 seem irrelevant now.

I can only imagine the outage of a then Councillor Ford had if a provincial government tried to over-step on municipalities like this back then.