I live in the downtown…

I live in the downtown immediately adjacent to the Bloor and Sherbourne bike lanes. I use a bike for the vast majority of my commutes to work, as well as to visit friends, shop, and attend restaurants. I have lived in Toronto without a car for almost 20 years.

Transit and micromobility are the only way to efficiently move the high and increasing downtown population to where they need to go. Cars can simply not scale, and we have recognised this by building many thousands of units that do not have parking spaces.

People on bikes deserve safety - drivers are using larger and larger vehicles and, anecdotally, driving more and more aggressively while traffic enforcement remains lower than in the past. Even on small side streets some drivers seem to get a kick out of tailgating and close passing cyclists.

This bill will make Toronto significantly worse for local residents in order to attempt to allow commuters to move through the city more quickly. Counter to the government's claims, this is not good for business. As the Bloor Annex BIA demonstrates - bike lanes are good for business.

This bill will take us back into construction pain along University. University had significant traffic issues this year - due to Ontario line construction, pain at the York and King intersection which was causing box blocking on University at King, and water main work on university which was paired with the bike lane builds. Now that the construction on the southbound side is complete the traffic issues have subsided. The bill will take us right back in to that construction hell - leading to many more months of congestion on a road that is now working efficiently.

We need solutions for congestion that actually work. Proper signal priority for our streetcars, bus lanes along Dufferin and other important corridors, improvements to signal timing, enforcement of box blocking. This bike lane bill is posturing - attacking local decision making in a terrible precedent. Toronto overwhelmingly rejected the two loudly anti bike-lane candidates and elected as mayor the most pro-bike candidate. It is unclear why people in Brampton and Niagara should have more of a say over our local roads, paid for with our property taxes, than we do.