Your government claims that…

Your government claims that it:

"Recognizes the need to build priority highways faster as our province grows in order to get people and goods out of gridlock and save drivers and businesses time and money."

The premise that new highways are needed is false. New highways induce sprawling subdivisions and car dependency, which leads to induced demand on highways which ultimately defeats the purpose of saving time and money. These facts are well documented in numerous traffic studies in all developed countries. The solution to motor vehicle congestion (which is not “gridlock”, the inability of vehicles to move in any direction in an urban area, a deliberate exaggeration on your part) is to build dense urban communities, not sprawl, and connect them within by local public transit and without by regional public rail transit.

Your government claims that it:
Is building Highway 413, recognizing the importance of this highway to millions of drivers from across Ontario.

At most, mere thousands, not “millions” of drivers would use the new highway, and it is not “important” in the way that public investment in regional rail would be important. Your claims are false, based on ideology, not facts.

You are planning to regulate “bicycle lanes (“bike lanes”) that require the removal of an existing lane of traffic. “

BICYCLES ARE TRAFFIC. The purpose of roads and streets is to move PEOPLE, not individual, single-occupant motor vehicles. Priority must be given to the efficient use of SPACE, not the efficient (and unattainable) movement of private motor vehicles. That means that public transit (e.g., buses holding dozens of people, and streetcars holding hundreds of people) must be given priority, while cyclists, using 1/12th of the space of private motor vehicles, are given the safe space they need to move. If you want to move people, not cars, public transit and cycle lanes are the OBVIOUS answer.

You say, “a regulation could be made to require the removal of the bike lane and its return to a lane of traffic” – once again, I say: BICYCLES ARE TRAFFIC. They are just more efficient, and use far less space, than motor vehicles. It is simple GEOMETRY.

You include in your legislation an exemption from the Environmental Assessment Act
and yet, you say that “Implications to the environment will be considered as the ministry identifies and develops the criteria for evaluating proposed new and existing cycling lanes.” The Environmental Assessment Act is the single most efficient and logical way to evaluate the effect of new and existing cycle lanes. A government that has created an EXPENSIVE MINISTRY devoted to “red tape reduction” should not be circumventing the Environmental Assessment Act to introduce a whole new level of bureaucratic red tape in order to implement an ideological agenda against active transportation.