The removal of bike lanes in…

The removal of bike lanes in Toronto is regressive policy that panders to those who visit the city and prize car convenience over the safety and autonomy of those who live here.

To forefront, I’m a lifelong Torontonian who owns a vehicle, takes the TTC, and rides a bike. I am also someone who has been struck by a speeding motor vehicle while crossing at a dedicated crosswalk. I purposely moved away from a car-centric neighbourhood to a neighbourhood that affords me the ability to use multiple forms of transportation, and this bill, while ultimately is about obscuring the corruption regarding the development of the Greenbelt, is also forcing dated ideals of what a city looks like onto a city that should be *progressing* and not part of a city I want to live in.

I live right off Danforth Avenue in Oakridge, approximately 800m east of where the bike lanes end. We have four schools, two places of worship, a recreation centre, and a supportive housing complex along our stretch of the Danforth- a lot of children and elderly people. We’ll come back to this.

While traffic along the Danforth from Broadview to VP is slow, it is safe- as a motorist, I LOVE that the right lane isn’t gummed up with parked cars, or people bobbing and weaving through lanes. As a pedestrian, slower traffic is safer traffic (again, getting hit by a car and being told by the off-duty firefighter who witnessed it that he thought I died makes me reasonably nervous about navigating traffic, especially now that enforcement seems non-existent.)

But also, the data has shown that the increase in car travel times is only a matter of few minutes. Are we really putting the value of a couple minutes ahead of peoples lives and safety?

Now, back to Oakridge. After the bike lanes end east of VP, cars FLY and the street becomes a de facto Indy500. I am TIRED of playing roulette with my life every time I cross my street and inevitably contend with speeding cars running red lights while I have the right of way to cross. This is a DAILY OCCURRENCE.

But it’s not just crossing the street- it’s also the sidewalks. The lack of bike lanes mean I also have to share the sidewalk with my bike riding neighbours, many of whom are young people and elderly. And while that’s annoying, I’d still rather see a cyclist safe on the sidewalk than dead on the side of the road (because expecting an elderly person to squeeze into the right lane alongside cars doing 70km/hr is a bonkers prospect).

In short, I am angry- beyond angry about this bill. This bill doesn’t represent my wants and needs as a resident, it doesn’t reflect the needs and safety concerns of my neighbourhood, and most importantly- it is not 1979. Toronto is no longer a sea of parking lots. It is dense, it is crowded, and it’s growing. Promising to prioritize cars to a voting block who salivates at the prospect of “owning the libs” by making streets more dangerous is frankly ghoulish.

If you’re insistent on extracting every natural resource of this province for maximum profit for a select few, my goodness- let us normal working people have the ability to ride a bike safely to our second and third jobs so we can afford to live here. A lot of us can’t afford cars or afford to live in proximity to reliable transit.