This is laughably ignorant…

This is laughably ignorant policy and absurd government overreach of the exact type that I thought conservatives were supposed to be opposed to. There was a time that (even as someone more progressive) I was excited about this government because it seemed committed to advancing evidence-based solutions to the challenges our province faced without too much regard for ideological posturing. Boy oh boy has team PC disabused me of that idea. What happened to municipalities knowing best what to do about land use as Premier Ford opined when explaining why he wouldn't force blanket upzoning across the province? What's with the double-standard?

Bike lanes have been implemented around the world and there is plenty of empirical evidence that could be evaluated to tackle this question. The record is fairly mixed: there are definitely instances of the addition of a cycle lane causing a small increase in travel times, and just as many examples of them having the opposite effect or none at all.

What is very, very certain is that removing and blocking new bike lanes will not fix Toronto's congestion problem. There is not and will never be enough space on Toronto's roads for all of the people who would like to drive there. If you could wave a wand and triple the city's road capacity overnight, those lanes would fill up to be just as congested as we are right now, because the city is simply too dense to allow everyone who has the means to drive here the luxury of doing so.

What actually fixes congestion is encouraging as many people as possible to use the more efficient modes of transportation those that are active and public.