Removing bike lanes on Bloor…

Removing bike lanes on Bloor, Yonge and University is an expensive decision that will make downtown traffic exponentially worse for over a year during construction, and deliver no benefits to drivers in the long term.

The city has found it would cost nearly $50 million to remove these bike lanes and the construction to re-align the streets would take nearly a year. During this year there would be reduced lanes, one way travel and entirely closed intersection. This is in addition to the 25 million dollars the city spent installing these lanes in the first place.

Closing streets and reducing lanes for a year is bad for business. The city has found through careful study before and after bike lake instillation that bike lanes bring customers into businesses. Cars are large and visible and give the illusion of busy-ness, but they are only passing through. There are no impromptu stops. They do not pay for parking to grab a quick thing before continuing.
Toronto is a year round cycling city. The people here regularly observe "The Coldest Day of the Year Ride" where they gather simply to cycle in the cold.
This plan is chaos for businesses on these streets, emergency vehicles and commuters.
To what end? the Bloor lanes alone move 8000 commuters a day. What is the goal? Do you want these cyclists to get into cars and contribute further to gridlock? Or is the plan that these bikes would be mixed dangerously in traffic and hold up cars behind them anyway? Which of these does the Ford regime think is the better situation?

Moving people downtown is a simple problem of geometry. Private vehicles are large, difficult to maneuver in tight spaces, and generally carry a single person. Bikes are small and well adapted for city streets.

This bill is driven by ideology instead of facts. It is the prioritisation of feelings over concrete data about how the world actual works. It is designed to make traffic in Toronto slower, dirtier, more expensive, and more dangerous.