To whom it may concern, From…

To whom it may concern,

From an economics perspective, removing bike lanes and returning those lanes back to cars doesn’t reduce traffic jams due to latent demand. That is, when there is only one car lane, there are fewer people whose marginal cost of a trip is higher than the marginal benefit (and thus people undertake the said trip). Increasing the availability of car lanes by returning another one means that now more people will be in the situation where their marginal benefit is higher than the marginal cost, thus undertaking the said trip. This will increase the number of cars, which will mean we are back to the gridlock. Clearly this is not the solution. In order to reduce the gridlock, fewer people need to ride cars into Toronto. The way to achieve this is two-fold: 1. Increase the marginal cost of the trip, for example, by introducing tolls to enter the city centre (London, UK is an example); 2. Providing alternatives such as public transit and bikes. Therefore we need more bike lanes and bike infrastructure, not less.