Regarding the idea of…

Regarding the idea of traffic lane removal in urban centers: you can't "fight" the gridlock by continuing to encourage increased automobile usage.

It doesn't matter how many lanes you build into cities, the cities are already at capacity. That is why gridlock exists--because so many individuals are trying to commute in using inefficient methods of commuting.

If you want urban density, then you need to have denser forms of transport as well--cities cannot accommodate car ownership for each and every individual from the surrounding region--it is just not possible. Cities are already being stretched to the limit of what is possible, and that is what you get gridlock from.

You can't add more traffic lanes inside the city everywhere without razing buildings(never going to happen) so gridlock will never go away if you keep trying to stuff more and more cars into cities.

The only way you will get rid of gridlock is if you decrease the number of cars on the road. It's not what a lot of people want to hear, but that's the only way you'll ever make it happen.

The only way you get that is if people don't need to own a car to get around. To do that, you need to provide a viable alternative--we need even more investments in public transit and we need to encourage and facilitate smaller forms of transport such as cycling. One could look at the example set by Britain, they have a program called the 'Cycle to Work Scheme' where folks are incentivized to ride to work by getting a tax-free purchase of a bicycle through an employee benefit.

Even if you *could* potentially raze a city and rebuild it from the ground up with 6 to 8 lane roads everywhere, that would be a completely different kind of place--if that's what you want, there are plenty of suburbs in Ontario built like that already. Car-centered urban planning has had its way in North America since the mid 20th century--but populations are reaching a point where that's not practical anymore. Let dense urban places be their own thing--we won't lose as a society by giving something else a chance.

As an addendum, legislation for building out telecom/broadband should be separated out from legislation concerning traffic planning and has no place on the same bill.

Attached, for anyone who would be curious is a document detailing the British Cycle to Work Scheme.