I am against Bill 212 and I…

I am against Bill 212 and I want to go over why.

I am a resident of Toronto and regular cyclist, using the bike lane infrastructure for work, picking up packages, visiting friends, and for exercise. I think the parts of Bill 212 that aims to remove bike lanes is bad for Toronto.

I think over the summer, citizens agree that the city has reached a breaking point for traffic. The long term solution to this is not to increase the number of car lanes, but to decrease the number of cars, or at least keep the number of cars the same. But how do you do that in a city where the population is growing? Making bicycling a safe and attractive option is part of the solution (along with better public transit). Citizens like me will choose to bike because it is a cheaper, faster alternative to driving. This decreases the number of cars therefore helping to alleviate car traffic. While increasing the number of car lanes might increase the flow of traffic for a short term, the traffic in a growing city will certainly increase in a few years due to induced demand. Look at Highway 401 as an example.

The reason some bikes lanes are not fully utilized is because the network is young. Newer parts of the bike network — such as Bloor West — are not connected to many other bike lanes in their vicinity. The stretches of Bloor near the city center have more bike traffic because it is connected to a more developed bike lane network. Bloor West will see similar levels of bike traffic once the bike network is more developed in that area.

Critics of bike lanes are using a circular argument. The reason we don't see more bicyclists is because there is not enough bike infrastructure. But critics are then saying we should remove bike infrastructure because there are not enough bicyclists.

A lot of these points are discussed better in a YouTube video in the channel "Oh The Urbanity!" titled "I Can’t Believe I Have to Make This Video". I'll attached it to this document.