This new policy on bike…

This new policy on bike lanes is counterproductive. One new lane of cars doesn't fix traffic. This has been proven over and over since Robert Moses kept promising fixes in NYC in the '30s. It merely encourages more people to travel by car until the new lane is just as clogged with traffic a week later.

The reality is, the only way to reduce car traffic is to provide viable alternatives to driving. Efficient and safe bike navigation in a city is one way to get to that. I'm not opposed to the idea of building out bike infrastructure on side streets, and that actually works pretty well in Vancouver, but requiring ministry permission for bike lanes on basically any public roadway does not get you there. It just delays any new bike lanes and discourages their use overall when we urgently need them.

Furthermore, taking out the existing mentioned bike lanes is counterproductive even if the overall plan is to use the side streets. The side streets of Toronto are not fully connected, so cyclists have no choice but to use streets like Bloor to get from one area of the city to another. This means cyclists will end up in those streets regardless of the proposed changes, but by sharing lanes, cyclists are at much greater risk and drivers have a much more stressful commute having to carefully navigate around them.

The road sprawl required by car-centric housing developments is expensive to maintain, with downtowns effectively subsidizing the suburbs in cities and towns across the continent. It's good business sense for cities to encourage more density, and that's much easier to do when not every resident is reliant on owning and storing a car. Encouraging walking and cycling by designing streets that make those modes safe and comfortable will accomplish that. Studies on Bloor also showed that the bicycle traffic brought more business, so local business owners should be in favour of bike lanes too!

A common talking point is that people can't bike in the winter. Looking at Montreal, this is untrue, and they get more snow than us in Toronto. There were few enough snow days last year that I could count them on one hand, and other than those, the bike lanes in Toronto were quite pleasant! It's certainly not as warm as being in a car, but by being active, it's much warmer than standing on a sidewalk waiting for a bus, which is already taken to be acceptable.

Bike lanes aren't causing the province's problems. Respectfully, please avoid creating more problems with regressive legislation, and let cities build the infrastructure their residents actually voted for.