Bill 212 will negatively…

Bill 212 will negatively affect me and my community, and should be abandoned. I am a regular user of the Yonge Street bike lanes, using them several times a week to travel from my home near Yonge & St. Clair to work in downtown Toronto. Removing the bike lanes would force me to ride my bicycle in mixed traffic with automobiles, reducing my safety by putting me at greater risk of collisions with automobiles. I recently moved to and selected my current building of residence because it was accessible to safe cycling infrastructure, and feel it is unfair for the province to change my local community in such an arbitrary and negative way.

Removing bike lanes is both unsafe and counterproductive. I don’t think removing bike lanes will achieve the stated objective of reducing traffic congestion. Bicycles will continue to ride on Yonge Street, but in general traffic lanes rather than their own bike lane, interacting more closely with cars. There will be more collisions, and I am concerned there will be serious injuries and deaths. Mixing bike and car traffic will still require cars to travel at a safe speed for cyclists and keep a safe distance back. There are no reasonable alternative routes to Yonge Street that have bike lanes, and no secondary or local streets that connect to provide an alternate route because of grid discontinuities and barriers like the CP rail corridor. Avenue Road and Mount Pleasant Road are the most reasonable alternatives, but are worse options because they are higher speed arterials with more traffic generally unsafe for bikes. In fact, it would seem that encouraging more cycling by providing safe infrastructure for it would be a better way to reduce emissions and congestion, which is caused by too many automobile drivers.

I am also concerned about equity impacts, that the bill will have disproportionate negative effects on poor people and visible minority communities. Cycling is affordable, and used more by disadvantaged individuals to work and accomplish daily tasks. Removing bike lanes will have negative impacts on bike couriers and delivery workers, many of whom are members of poor and minority communities. The equity impacts of removing bike lanes have not been studied, and should be studied carefully before the proposals are implemented.