As a Professional Engineer…

As a Professional Engineer and a Professor of Industrial Engineering, I have spent my career teaching and conducting research on complex systems, and in particular on human behaviour within such systems.

I am also an experienced year-round cyclist, who has used a bicycle for all purposes, including commuting to work, for the past 50+ years. (Incidentally, I am also a car owner.) To this I add that, in addition to Toronto, my experience in commuting by bicycle has included several years of living and working in the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Japan. In all of those other countries, extensive networks of bike paths is the norm, rather than the exception.

What I want to convey is that there are no simple “common sense” solutions to the complex problem of traffic gridlock. In particular, not only is it unlikely that blindly removing bicycle lanes will reduce traffic gridlock over the medium to long term, but many existing scientific studies provide evidence that installing additional properly designed bike lanes will in fact eventually reduce gridlock … in addition, critically, to increasing health and safety of our population.

The City of Toronto has invested heavily in carrying out responsible evidenced-based research to support the design of the bicycle lanes that have been installed over the past few years. The City of Toronto has also stated that it is willing to carry out any improvements that may be revealed in the design of existing bike paths, in addition to any necessary improvements in any future bike lanes. To remove existing bike lanes, and prohibit future bike lanes, rather than improving them … especially in the absence of any hard evidence that removing them would produce improvements in traffic flow … would be not only irrational, but also potentially dangerous to present and future cyclists whose lives those bike paths are protecting. (It would also be an extravagant waste of taxpayers’ money.)