Bike lane infrastructure…

Bike lane infrastructure improves congestion in cities, they do not make it work.

Toronto’s bikeshare program averages over 170,000 rides a month.

I am an average 30-something office worker in the downtown core. Despite making a higher-than-average salary, the high costs of living in the city, combined with the god-awful parking and traffic conditions in this city, mean that I do not have a car and rely on cycling, or transit, to get around.

I cant really afford a car now, and I certainly couldn’t afford to get around by any other means for the first 10 years I lived here, was a student, a min wage worker.

Nearly every single person I know - specifically those with a similar lifestyle to mine - relies on cycling to move through the city. The bike lane infrastructure on bloor, Jarvis, and university are essential arteries to get around. Without dedicated bike lanes, you are slowing down each of these roads to the speed of anxious drivers who are unaware and too unskilled to drive with/alongside cyclists, and risking the lives of people on bikes in the process.

The bike lane pilot on bloor was a massive success, has almost near-perfect reception for people who actually *live* close to bloor, saw positive uptake of business on bloor.

And for University? That bike lane project was barely finished before these plans to take it away. University Ave is not a street where vehicle congestion is an issue to begin with! It’s nearly always quiet.

Destroying these lanes will cost the city and the province 5x the price it took to build them in the first place (poor budget control for a government fixated on cutting budgets), and nobody living in the city, especially along these routes, is actually in support of this decision.

Let cities manage themselves and back the hell out of Toronto. Don’t you have better things to do than antagonizing people who have few options for getting around? We just want to go to work, get groceries, feel safe on the road. You’re destroying key infrastructure that helps people survive here.