This legislation is…

This legislation is appallingly destructive, ill conceived, and dangerous.

In 2021, I had my leg broken in 4 places by an SUV and a distracted driver, while riding a bike on a city street near my job at a hospital. My bright clothing and plastic helmet were no match for automotive steel. I needed multiple surgeries and many months of physical therapy to learn to walk again. As a result of my injuries, I will live with chronic pain forever. Honestly, I was terrified I’d never be able to go back to my job as a nurse.

Safer infrastructure protects people from such injuries. So far this year, 6 people have been killed riding a bike in my city, and 12 pedestrians have been killed by cars. Sadly, many of the people getting hurt are kids and older people - and these are preventable injuries and deaths. Street design determines who lives and who dies when collisions occur. And we can do better to keep people safe.

Public safety matters. I'm a nurse at one of Ontario's biggest hospitals, and I ride a bike to work sometimes. As both a healthcare professional and citizen, I hate seeing more people get injured the way that I was. Nurses are trained to advocate for the safety of communities. And removing safer infrastructure is incredibly harmful to public safety. It’s also an appalling use of our tax dollars, since some of the routes being discussed were only recently built - at great expense.

The safety of kids and young people matters. I'm also a parent, and I'm concerned about more kids and young people being hit and injured by cars. Young people and students are getting killed by dump trucks and other vehicles - along the route that I take to the hospital I work in. I can only imagine the anguish and grief their families must be going through.

Of course we all hate traffic gridlock. It’s stressful to navigate, and an enormous waste of time and money. However, real problems require real solutions - based on the best available evidence for what will protect us. This is how doctors and nurses are trained to make decisions, and more public policy needs to be based on good evidence.

Induced demand is real. It has been a well understood idea for decades, among urban planners and professionals who study how to make cities work better. The more lanes that we add to roads and highways, the more people decide to drive. This generates an endless feedback loop that just increases traffic. The 401 has up to 18 lanes in places, and it’s one of the biggest highways in North America. No matter how many lanes we add, there’s always more traffic. If adding more lanes was going to solve traffic congestion, this solution would have worked already. Cities like Los Angeles have been adding lanes to roadways for generations, and the biggest result has been notorious traffic jams.

“You’re not just stuck in traffic. You are traffic.” The only proven way to reduce traffic is to reduce the number of cars on the road. This requires giving more people better options. It requires investing in transit, so that it can get more people where they need to go. It means building more communities where people can walk, ride a bike, or catch a bus or train to work or shopping. Millions of people driving individual cars everywhere is the least efficient system of mass transit ever created.

Environmental health matters. As a parent, I worry about the safety of the world I am leaving my children. Cars create noxious smog and fine particulate pollution that cause respiratory diseases like asthma. Wildfire smoke regularly causes dangerously poor air quality during summers now, as climate change lengthens the fire season and drives more dangerous disasters. News stories are filled with stories of scores of people killed by hurricanes and towns demolished by floods. Most cars on the road burn oil, which is actively accelerating these problems, and making our world less predictable and our future less safe. The more fossil fuel we burn, the more headaches and danger we leave to our children.

Active transportation - including walking and biking - is healthier than driving. Too many people have to drive everywhere, because they have no alternatives. Too many people live largely sedentary lifestyles. And as a result, North Americans live with epidemic rates of obesity and diabetes. Sitting around all day every day is incredibly unhealthy - and contributes to diseases that are very expensive to treat. What if more people got 30 minutes of exercise every day while doing errands? What if more people could walk 15 minutes to a transit hub and easily get to work? For people with borderline hypertension or diabetes, regular exercise can mean the difference between needing medication and just building a healthier lifestyle.

Ontario needs so, so many other things. We desperately need to invest in affordable housing - and too many people are miserable because they can’t find decent homes. We need to allow the creation of denser housing, in walkable neighbourhoods served by usable transit - and real zoning reform is painfully overdue. Our transit systems are underfunded, and sheltering far too many homeless people. Our schools are understaffed and need repairs. Millions of people in Ontario are waiting to find a family doctor. Our hospitals are understaffed - and priorities like Bill 124 decimated healthcare staffing, just when nurses and clinical professionals were most desperately needed. Too many people have suffered and are suffering because we neglect these problems.

This proposed legislation will make life more unsafe for vulnerable people. It will solve zero problems, and drag things backward. And it is not based on any real evidence for anything that can possibly solve our problems or protect public safety.

We can do better.