Dear Government of Ontario, …

Dear Government of Ontario,

The recently proposed legislation to an offense to common sense Ontarions, an exorbitant expense to settle old political scores, and will not solve the very real problem of congestion in Toronto. The Province needs to be spending this time and money on proven techniques.

1) It is a massive governmental overreach:
Municipalities own and control the roads within their jurisdiction. This comes with both rights and responsibilities, the responsibility to maintain infrastructure along the road and the right to set road design in line with the needs of local residents. Often cycling networks are the outcomes of long-range planning, multi-year undertakings by cities accompanied by extensive public outreach. The idea that some MTO staff sitting in an office suddenly knows better is insulting

Consolidating this at the Provincial Government is a) inefficient, why duplicate the staff needed to do this job and bloat the provincial civil service, b) non-sensical, why should staff who have likely never been to the street they are now legislating the design of understand the needs better than local staff who are and c) sets a dangerous precedent of the province subsuming local powers and pushing aside municipalities.

2) It won’t impact congestion at all:
The most congested streets are not streets with bike lanes, shockingly the most congested streets are the streets with the most cars in the City. Taking away a safe pathway for cycling will push more people back into cars, increasing the numbers on the road and the degradation of Toronto streets faster (since cars weigh more than bikes). Also, it’s important to remember that new cars don’t just increase delay on a 1-1 ratio each new car is a longer queue that takes longer to queue for a traffic light cycle, backing up interconnected streets.
When bike lanes are separated, these commuters form their own queue, reducing the strain on the vehicular queue.

The math doesn’t make sense. The standard design for a bike lane in Ontario is 1.5 m wide +whatever buffer is used, whereas a standard vehicle lane is 3-3.5m wide. Therefore removing bike lanes means trading bi-directional travel for a single new direction of vehicular travel.This policy does not regain the space people think it will.

The cyclists that are not pushed back into cars are now sharing the lane with cars, since Ontario law allows for cyclists taking the lane cars will now be forced to share the same space (see point b about lack of space saving of this policy) with slower moving vehicles.

3) Bike lanes have been proven to be better for small businesses
The Bloor Annex BIA has come out in defense of the bike lanes, citing the positive impact it has had on local businesses. Studies on the Bloor bike lane found the installation was correlated with higher total consumer spend.
It is counter to existing provincial policy around housing development, which now sees Toronto developers building more bike parking than car parking.
Building car free developments is substantially cheaper, more space efficient and is the only way Ontario will ever meet its housing goals. Residents of these housing developments deserve to get to work safely.

4) It is extremely expensive
The City of Toronto estimated the cost to be $48 million dollars. For this cost there are a number of policy interventions which would have a greater impact on congestion relief. The number one suggested tactic for improving urban travel times is signal timing. For this cost the Province could install 196 new traffic signals with the latest technology to improve signal timing around the City. It could work with the existing infrastructure and instead pay for engineers to retime over 9600 signals (based on average North America costs). It could pay for more inspectors to enforce Traffic Managment Plans around construction sites to ensure minimal traffic disruptions. It could expand access to transit, expand park and ride options, literally anything else beyond removing the lanes which cause MORE congestion
Doing construction on roads causes lane closures and congestion. It is a fact of life, especially city life. But doing unnecessary construction to rip out recently constructed infrastructure causing extra congestion in a city already filled with construction is offensive to Ontarions.

5) Bike lanes don’t emergency response.
When it comes to our roads, some trips are more important in terms of travel time than others, and the most important stakeholders, Emergency service providers, have confirmed that the expansion of bike lanes in Toronto have not impacted response times. In fact, downtown Wards of the city, home to higher number of bike lanes, have better emergency response times than the inner-suburbs. Plus, bike lanes, like those on Bloor, are often designed to allow for emergency vehicles to mount the protection devices providing more space for emergency vehicles to get by. You know what is harder to move around than a flex post, a two-ton, 12 ft long car (average car size).

Please consider spending time and money on proven techniques to battle congestion and not waste tax payers dollars fighting a political battle over a couple blocks in Toronto.