Premier Ford, minsters, and…

Premier Ford, minsters, and MPPs,

I'm commenting on Bill 212 (Reducing Gridlock, Saving You Time Act, 2024) to voice my strong opposition to the bill for reasons I'm outlining below.

- My main concern with this bill involves the reduction of bike lanes on major downtown Toronto arteries, including Bloor St, University Ave, and Yonge St. To be clear: these are all busy streets, but they carry traffic of all sorts. All of them are shared between cars, buses, cyclists (including commuters and delivery workers), and pedestrians. Bike lanes were added to these arteries as not just a convenience feature, but as a critical part of safety infrastructure for all road users. While Ontario does allow cyclists to take the lane if they feel it's the safest option, this is usually an unsafe option since many drivers are unaware of this and will endanger cyclists out of spite. I've personally been run off the road this way, taking a protected left where there was (at the time) no bike lane in Ottawa, before I moved to Toronto. Giving cyclists a segregated right-of-way is safer for them, and keeps drivers intuitively informed of when they should be more careful — and it comes with the convenient upside of not getting stuck behind slower cyclists using a car lane, or risking a dangerous pass to get in front of cyclists.

- Counterintuitively, there's a point at which adding car lanes reduces road throughput for any given road. One of the main causes of traffic slowdowns, bumper-to-bumper and sideswipe accidents, gridlock, and driver frustration is merging across multiple lanes in a short distance; speaking as someone who does have to drive through downtown Toronto traffic, with wide roads in a downtown core, this is certainly something drivers feel. Reducing lanes means less merging, clearer options for drivers, and likely less time spent stuck in traffic.

- I'm concerned at the amount of due diligence done by the Province in the leadup to this decision. Rather than a study to determine whether the removal of segregated bike lanes will have the effect sought by this bill (motor vehicle traffic reduction, ostensibly), this bill feels like politicking; declaring an intent (bike lane removal), and then working backwards from it to justify a solution (claiming that removing bike lanes will reduce traffic). Because of this, the work which will be done as a result of this bill's passing is based on a much lower standard of evidence, so to speak, than the initial work to put the lanes in, which passed several stages of environmental and traffic review, with reports and public comment periods where commenters could give informed input because of those reports.

- Many of these lanes are quite new, with all three either being completed or substantially extended in just the past 2-3 years, meaning that many road users have just spent months living with the inconvenience of construction on major arteries; on its face, it's not reasonable to subject drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists to more slowdowns and detours just so these bike lanes can be removed.

- The removal of bike lanes, is, to my knowledge, not costed; in an economic climate where the current provincial Government is ostensibly trying to eke out any possible financial efficiency, any plan to remove bike lanes at the province's expense (as offered to the city of Toronto) should be transparently priced so that commenters can give input based on that figure, especially in the context of some of the other significant expenses the Province has chosen to take on (or not) lately.