Removing bike lanes will not…

Removing bike lanes will not reduce gridlock it will increase it. A prime example is to observe the number of people biking to work in the morning. On my own short commute i will easily see nearly 100 people biking to work. Often there are herds of 20-30 bikers on each block. Discouraging the use of bikes by removing bike lanes on long stretches of road downtown means more drivers on the road and more traffic. And yes many of these bikers will resort to driving if need be. For most of us our commute to work is too long to walk, and access to the ttc is incredibly poor due to the lack of stations, and the fact that streetcars are often slower than walking.

Additionally, even if all this was false, and removing bike lanes would not increase the number of drivers, it most certainly would not help with gridlock in the city. Adding an additional lane is not going to reduce traffic. The issue is not that there are not enough lanes, the issue is that getting on and off the highway is incredibly congested, if you want to reduce gridlock for cars, streamline getting onto the Gardner. You can add as many lanes as you want but your still going to end up with a massive line of cars waiting to get onto the highway at the same entrance. The reason for traffic and congestion is not a lack of bandwidth, it is a result of bottleneck points. More specifically these bottleneck points are the entrances and exits to high bandwidth roadways, in Toronto’s case, the Gardner and DVP. I agree that traffic is a problem, but you’re trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole here and its not going to have the outcome you want.

Lastly, think about the future of Toronto and what kind of city you want it to be. Do we want to be a city meant for cars, or do we want to be a city meant for people? I envision a future where cars are seldom needed downtown due to high quality and accessible public transit, bike lanes etc. Roads could be replaced by pedestrian walkways, stoplights replaced by trees and art. This may be a bit of a pipe dream, but I would rather work towards a maybe unachievable ideal, improving our city and its beauty along the way, rather than disregard those ideals entirely and let Toronto devolve into a city meant for machines rather than people.