Hey, this is really dumb…

Hey, this is really dumb.

The fundamental problem, setting aside the issues of safety and accessibility for cyclists, e-cyclists, scooter users, etc., is that there is an abundance of evidence that demonstrates that more vehicle lanes results in more traffic and more congestion.

I could quote peer-reviewed articles here but that isn't even necessary. It's a matter of simple geometry:

Roads are divided into lanes. Vehicles must remain within these lanes. The number of vehicles that will travel down a road is always orders of magnitude greater than the number of lanes on that road.

Now, when you go from a 1 lane road to a 2-lane road, then you are in a sense doubling the capacity of that road. But every subsequent lane addition adds a rapidly decreasing quantity of capacity to a road.

But it's even worse than that. Road lanes in the same direction of travel are generally not discrete. Vehicles can change lanes. The more lanes there are, the more reasons there will be for vehicles to change lanes. Each act of changing lane creates the possibility of a disruption to the traffic flow. Each disruption to traffic flow will have a possibility to reduce the maximal speed at which traffic can flow.

Even small, momentary speed reductions on roads can have huge overall consequences for congestion, as the speed reduction propagates backwards from the location of that reduction at a rate that is a function of the overall volume of traffic flow. If the volume is high, and the distance between vehicles is low as a result, then this can create huge knock-on effects that snowball dramatically.

The problem is that this event only needs to happen once per lane for the effect to be global to the road, and as soon as one lane becomes congested, cars will switch lanes, creating an increasing number of opportunities for the same thing to happen in all other lanes.

As lanes act as a multiplier to the overall volume of traffic possible on a road, and also act as a hard limit to the number of parallel flows of traffic on that road, then the severity of any congestion event grows exponentially with the total number of lanes. On a single lane road, congestion can only grow linearly.

Multi-lane roads can create the illusion of congestion reduction while there are no events that impede traffic flow, but they possess the potential to create far greater congestion events when the conditions are met, while also increasing the number of opportunities for a congestion event to occur.

By removing cycle lanes to prioritize car lanes, while also removing agency from municipalities and burdening them with the cost of this loss of agency, you will make traffic and congestion exponentially worse across the province while also removing access for a form of transport that is far far more resilient to this kind of congestion. Bicycles, and other self-powered or e-powered forms of personal transportation are not required to move within given lanes for a direction of travel because these vehicles can safely and efficiently navigate obstacles and speed variations with minimal impact on the overall flow capability of a road.

The link is provided because you require one, and it provides another valid take on why more lanes are bad. but the above is intended to provide hopefully a clear explanation based on simple mathematical principles and common sense.