I have problems with this…

I have problems with this bill that encompass the following complaints:

1) Provincial governments should not be adding red tape and bureaucracy to local municipality decisions regarding increasing transportation options. The amount of cars inside the city center is far too high and people need to be given alternatives to enter and exit it without having to resort to using a car that will just add to the gridlock we experience now. Adding more lanes to roads has never caused traffic to lessen, only get worse over time. Especially if the ONLY option to get to and from anywhere in the city is using cars (like taking away bike lanes would do).

2) Gig work has become ubiquitous in the city and most of that work is done using bikes, or similar two wheeled motorized vehicles. This will not stop if bike lanes are removed. If the bike lanes are removed we will be facing a lot more fatalities and accidents to the people performing these tasks, as well as punitive damages to the people driving the cars. Accidents like this also stop the flow of traffic and cause more gridlock. It will be HARDER not easier to drive around in the city, as drivers will have to be a lot more cautious to avoid bikes they can't predict being around them, slowing traffic significantly. Removing these bike lanes literally makes zero sense if the goal is to improve traffic flow.

3) Bike lanes support transit investment as people can bike to transit stations. Bike rentals help with this immensely as well as people can rent a bike local to where they live in the suburbs, and then drop said rented bike off at a transit station and go on their way. If we want to encourage people to use our transit system into which we are investing so much, we should be making it easier, not harder to get to them via as many ways as possible.

4) If we are talking about environmental impacts, concrete is a very carbon intensive material to create. By ripping up these lanes we are adding to pollution overall on the planet. Concrete dust is also a bad pollutant for people's lungs as they have to breathe this stuff when it is being removed.

5) The fact that highway 413 is in this proposal at all seems like an underhanded way to use bike lanes as a straw man to bully legislation through to make it easier to ignore environmental impacts of building through our green belt in the future.

Overall I feel that this proposal is short sighted, underhanded and a disingenuous way to get tax payer money into the hands of private interests that are close to the people putting this bill forward.

Thank you
Marko