I am extremely disappointed…

I am extremely disappointed that this bill includes provisions for preventing the reduction of road lanes for the purposes of installing bike lanes.

Firstly, I object to the idea in principle that legislation is needed to prevent the reduction of road lanes in any circumstances. These decisions should be made based on appropriate planning studies and strategies, not an irresponsible top-down moratorium.

More significantly, I am frustrated that the government is attempting to, in essence, relegislate the provisions of Bill 212 that would have allowed the province to remove protected bike lanes that had previously been installed in concert with car lane reductions. Bill 60 does not propose to remove existing infrastructure. However, the moratorium on road modifications for new bike infrastructure is inadvisable for the same reason that those provisions of Bill 60 were unconstitutional; in the words of a staff lawyer at Ecojustice, "remov[ing] protected bike lanes in the face of [the government's] own expert evidence that doing so won’t alleviate congestion and will put lives at risk.”