I think that the government…

I think that the government is really focusing on the wrong things with this bill.

Part XII of the bill says that a municipality cannot create a bike lane on a highway or part of a highway unless it has been approved by the Ministry.

It is stated earlier in the bill that "highway" has the same meaning as in the Public Transportation and Highway Improvement Act, where it is defined as "a common and public highway, street, avenue, parkway, driveway, square, place, bridge, viaduct, trestle or any other structure incidental thereto, any part of which is intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles and includes the area between the lateral property lines thereof".

This part of the bill will be applied where the bicycle lane would reduce the number of marked lanes available for cars, meaning that this can be applied to almost any street in any municipality, which will waste an enormous amount of time and money when the Ministry has to review proposal after proposal for bike lanes.

The municipal governments are the ones who know their city and streets best and are the ones that should be making this type of decision, not the Ministry, whose employees may never have even seen the municipality whose bike lane they will be reviewing.

Doug Ford is also planning to rip out bike lanes in Toronto, wasting the millions of dollars spent on building them in the first place, as well as millions more get the work of removing them done in order to speed up car commute by a few minutes, or seconds. I consider this as well as the money that will be spent reviewing all the bike lane proposals to be a very poor use of funds.

All that money could be used to focus on actually building planned LRT projects, improving train infrastructure, bus infrastructure, or many, many other options for public transit. We need more ways of getting people out of cars and onto busses, trains, and bikes. These all take up much less space than cars and will free up road space for drivers and make their commutes shorter because there will be fewer cars on the road.

More options for transit will also put money back in the pockets of lower income families, which could be critical for them. Being able to bike more often, or take the train or bus instead of driving everywhere will mean they can save huge amounts of money not having to pay for gas. They can drive their car when it is necessary and enjoy other methods of getting around when it is not. Instead, this bill will make it even harder to survive without driving.

Fewer cars on the road will also mean less maintenance is required for their upkeep, saving millions of dollars. Fewer cars also means less traffic on the 400 series highways, and less of a need to continue expanding them. The farmland, wetlands, waterways, etc. that will be damaged by the proposed 413 are much more valuable to Canada than another highway that will soon be clogged with traffic as well because we are not reducing people's need to drive everywhere.

Speaking for myself, the only thing holding me back from biking to work is that there is one stretch of incredibly busy road that is very dangerous for cyclists. I can get most of the way there safe in a bike lane, and if there was also a bike lane on this last stretch of road I would not hesitate to bike to work. There are many other people like me, and we should focus on building more bike lanes to get people out of cars and off the roads, reducing traffic and speeding up commute times for everyone instead of adding useless bureaucracy and making it harder to make the lives of commuters better.