Bill 60 - Fighting Delays,…

Bill 60 - Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025 – Modern Transportation – Prohibiting Vehicle Lane Reduction for New Bicycle Lanes.

Prohibiting vehicle lane reduction for new bicycle lanes is not "modern transportation". Cars have dominated our transportation landscape for decades, since the 1950-1960s when automotive industries manipulated our culture and governments to allow the automobile to rise to transportation dominance so that the wealthy could extract profits from every day people. Today we face huge crises, the climate crisis, cost of living crisis, housing crisis, biodiversity crisis, health crisis. All of these crisis disproportionately affect the poor and are exacerbated by our need to use automobiles for basic functions, such as to feed ourselves. The requirement to have an automobile to be a functioning member of society is a choice we have made at the encouragement of the automotive industry. This choice means we use the most expensive, most energy intensive, least space efficient, and deadliest mode of transportation for nearly all our transportation needs.

A true modern transportation policy, would look more like something from Paris. Their transportation policies strive to address the many crises we are facing both here in Canada and globally. For example cars produce a huge amount of air pollution which can cause and exacerbate many lung health problems. Examples of Paris trying to address these concerns are the Pairs breaths scheme, (1), and the ban on diesel motors in Paris streets (2). Modern transportation policy would move away from the private automobile and instead embrace micro-mobility and public transit for their space efficient, scalable, cost effective, nature as well as the health benefits. Private automobiles simply are not suitable in dense urbane areas and over the past few decades cities have been increasing in density. Paris has been investing in bike infrastructure for some time now, with 150M invested between 2015-2020, another 250M in 2021, and in 2023 France's national government announced 2 Billion invested in new bicycle infrastructure between 2023 and 2027 (3). This is what a "modern transportation" policy should look like. Not a policy which forces us to maintain the status quo since the 1960s of car first transportation.

If this is some sort of attempt to address concerns of traffic congestion, that is non-sense. Micro-mobility is far more space efficient than private automobiles. Building infrastructure to allow more people to safely use micro-mobility options for their transportation needs, will free up space on congested roads and streets, lessening congestion. As we have seen over and over for decades, because of a phenomenon called induced demand, the only way to solve congestion is to give people viable, more space efficient methods, of transportation so that fewer people have to drive, freeing up space on roads and streets for those who have to drive. Sometimes that will require taking some space from cars to allow these more space efficient modes of transportation, be it either micro-mobility or public transport. If we never give up any space from cars, these projects will fail to meet the transportation needs of their users and we will condemned to worsening congestion on our roads and streets as population continues to increase.

Impeding the investment in micro-mobility infrastructure, and ensuring the dominance of the private vehicle, will ensure that our transportation infrastructure will not be modern and it will fail to meet the needs and challenges we are facing now, and that will continue to face, even more so, in the future.