Bike lanes are an essential…

Bike lanes are an essential part of city infrastructure; removing them would be a grievous mistake.

First and foremost, bike lanes save lives by reducing opportunities for drivers to strike and injure or kill cyclists. This should be reason enough to leave them be.

Second, removing these bike lanes will not improve gridlock. There are countless studies showing that bike lanes ease congestion, as well as that adding additional car lanes makes congestion worse (there is so, so much data on this latter point, from cities all over the world - widening roads and highways makes traffic worse, full stop). To suggest that removing these bike lanes will improve gridlock is to ignore the facts and misdirect the blame. Cyclists don't cause traffic - motorists do. Cyclists also don't exist in a vacuum: removing our safe access to the roads will force many of us into other means of transport. In many cases, this will mean getting back into cars, which will create more traffic.

Third, spending ~48 million taxpayer dollars to rip up these lanes (many of which are newly installed), against the wishes of the government the people of Toronto have entrusted to manage our city, is a ludicrous waste of money and an insult to voters.

Toronto, like every major city with a dense population, needs a variety of safe and accessible transportation options in order to thrive. Cars are the most expensive and least efficient means of transportation in a city (not to mention the most dangerous and the worst for the environment). Simply put, they take up a lot of space and money and move fewer people, more slowly, than bikes or trains. The only way to solve gridlock is to make it easier for people to choose not to drive. Bike lanes are just one of many ways of doing this, but removing them is absolutely a step in the wrong direction.

Walking back the progress we have made in improving cycling infrastructure makes our city worse. And again, most importantly, people are going to die because of this decision.