Removal of existing bike…

Removal of existing bike lanes is a gross overstep of provincial authority.
It needs to remain under the purview of the city/local planning and the City is the best suited to handle this.

The City is the one with the vision, the LONG term plan, and the DATA and statistics supporting how bike ridership has been continuously increasing with every year after a bike lane on a given stretch is implemented. That's more people out of cars and less cars on that stretch to creat congestion. Win win.

Claims that businesses suffer with bike lanes is also completely false. The province is only citing anecdotal evidence and it's simply not true. Talk to boor Street BIA - business has increased. Remember, people don't want to walk along, and shop along, a highway centred around cars. Inviting public spaces drives PEOPLE traffic (not car traffic) into the area and makes them spend more money.

Bike lanes only on secondary routes is absolutely not a solution. They need to be in addition to, not instead of.
I challenge the province to find any continuous side road immediately parallel to Bloor where bikes lanes are proposed to be removed. It doesn't exist in Toronto's street fabric. This is another clear example where the province has not informed themselves and is just hastily pushing this forward without any critical thinking.

So far all claims I've seen to date made by the province and the Minister of Transportation as evidence to why removals of Bloor, University and Yonge bike lane is warranted, is flat out false, and/or misleading.
1.2 % are bikers is entirely false. That census data includes so many GTA car centric suburbs which significantly dilutes the numbers of users in downtown Toronto where these bike lanes are.

It's imperative the province realizes there absolutely cannot be enough road space available to have every single person in Toronto and GTA drive for every trip they make. It's was never possible and shouldn't be possible because one would want to live in a place where that is possible because it would be just massive highways everywhere and nothing else.
Build bike lanes, and people will come. This results in less emissions, more people getting around using a significantly smaller portion of the right of way per capita than cars which helps the provinces case in lower congestion.

Build road capacity for cars and people will come - this is law of induced demand. A principle that has been proven over and over again here and all around the world. Building more road space for cars DOES. NOT. SOLVE. CONGESTION.
The public should not need to teach the government on how this works.

The province seemingly chooses to have traffic engineers only look at the modelling in the first year or so after implementation of increased road capacity to see that it briefly lowers congestion, but fails to analyze all the years after; how congestion will be just as bad, or worse. Increased capacity will just bring out more drivers into the road. It's a never ending cycle therefore capacity does not solve congestion.

I work for a transit agency in Ontario and am proud to be working on solutions and bringing new transit lines to fruition - getting people out of cars and where they need to go, faster and more conveniently.
Transit and active transportation is a crucial and long term plan with a lot of different pieces and capital needed over time to make a comprehensive network, and the province is exclusively looking very short term which undermines and destroys the years of long term planning the City has done.

The province seems to be making opinion based decision instead of evidence based decisions, relying on personal opinion and anecdotal evidence, to try and justify this as opposed actual planning experts (not just traffic engineers).