I do not support this…

I do not support this proposal. For many reasons,

First, I believe it is an over reach of the provincial government. The provincial government should not be adding more bureaucracy and red-tape to city level planning. What is best for a city should be determined by the city and the residents of it. I do not think that it is right that traffic in one city (Toronto) should be used as evidence that this proposal is correct for every city (Ottawa).

Secondly, I do not think that this proposal accurately reflects the public interest. This proposal focuses only on movement of motor vehicle traffic. The only reference to any sort of criteria for consideration of a proposed bicycle lane is "[...] whether it would unduly diminish the orderly movement of motor vehicle traffic"

There are many reasons why you should or should not dedicate public land to a bicycle lane. It is wrong to only consider the impact it would have the trip time of citizens who are able bodied enough to drive, financially secure enough to own and maintain a private vehicle and choose to use an automobile to make a trip. There are many people who either cannot or do not want to drive, this includes every single child under the age of 16 who cannot legally drive. Many of these people would greatly benefit from the addition of a bicycle lane but their needs are not considered in the current proposal.

If it makes sense to require the Ministry to approve potential bike lanes, it should at least require the ministry to consider more than just the trip time of automobiles.

It should consider how much a bike lane will improve the safety of bicyclists. I do not think the need for a driver to get to their destination on time is more important than a cyclist's life. There is a reason why we allow children to bicycle on the sidewalk, because we know a cyclist sharing the road with automobiles is inherently unsafe and we don't want to subject our children to that danger. For our youth having dedicated bicycle infrastructure is useful for getting around without the need for an adult chauffeur.

The Ministry should consider how much bicycle traffic the new bicycle lanes will generate. Right now there is a clear desire from citizens for safer bicycle infrastructure. From the City of Toronto Cycling Study from July 2019, over 1 in 3 respondents (35%) said that "they would like to travel
more by bike if the streets felt safer and there was dedicated bike infrastructure." This means there are a lot of people who would like to make more trips by bicycle who are not because the infrastructure is not in place. These respondents are not currently making trips by bicycle, so they are most likely traveling by other means, most likely automobile. These are people who are in cars contributing to the city gridlock because they feel compelled to drive due to the lack of safe bicycle infrastructure. By building safe bicycle infrastructure that is useful in that it connects places people are to places people want to go, it will remove drivers from the roads. Furthermore this 1 in 3 number are only people who do not currently bicycle. Only 21% of respondents said "they are not comfortable riding a bicycle even on path or trails or are just not interested in cycling" this means that 79% of respondents, a substantial majority, would benefit from safe, dedicated bicycle infrastructure in one way or another. There are a lot of people who want this infrastructure, so to consider rejecting it (or removing it) based solely on how it affects the movement of motor vehicle traffic is not representative of the true public's interests.

It should also consider if the bicycle infrastructure increases the people's freedom of choice. Right now there is substantially more infrastructure to support driving over any other form of transportation. Currently it is possible to drive everywhere and additional forms of transportation are optionally added on. This means that for certain trips you are pretty much all but required to get there by motor vehicle. By denying or removing bicycle infrastructure you take away people's freedom to choose how they navigate their city. If a person has to choose between risking bodily harm or driving then is that really a choice?

I can confidently say that this proposal does not fit my interests, I often find it troublesome that if I want to go to the grocery store that's 1.2 km from my house I can either drive, where all the streets are designed to make it easy and the large parking lot in front of the store makes it easy for me to store my private vehicle completely free while I shop. However, I have started trying to bike to the store and it's a very different experience. The 1.2 km doesn't have any bicycle infrastructure. So if I want to be a law abiding citizen I have to bike on the road. The trip requires biking on a major road, because the grocery store itself is on that major road so it would be subject to this proposal. This road has no dedicated bicycle infrastructure so even though the trip is short it feels dangerous ... so inevitably I have stopped going to the store by bike and have started driving again. I would like to stop being in my car taking up space on the road for the people who are trying to get somewhere they need to go by car just so that I can travel my 1.2km to my grocery store.

So there are so many more reasons why a bicycle lane should or should not be considered than just the movement of motor vehicles, and there will be no one size fits all solution for the entire province and no one would be able to better determine if a new bicycle lane would be beneficial for the city as a whole more than the city!

Thirdly, as a driver in a city I think this proposal makes trips worse for drivers. From the same 2019 study, 17% of respondents said that they are willing to bicycle on the street regardless of traffic and without dedicated bicycle lanes. As a driver I would prefer that these bicyclists have their own lane. Sharing the road with a bicyclist makes a drive worse. Bicyclists often can not reach the speed limit on major roads, they are slower to accelerate after coming to a full stop at a traffic light. This can affect the speed of traffic of the vehicles around them. It would be much better when I am driving to not need to deal with a bicyclist on the road and either being stuck behind them, or needing to navigate around them.

Finally, I believe that a bicycle lane most likely doesn't impact the movement of motor vehicles as the proposal seems to suggest. In Ottawa the one-way street of O'Connor underwent a transformation to change it from 4 lanes (during rush hour) of motor vehicle traffic to two-lanes of motor vehicle traffic, a protected bi-directional bicycle lane and a dedicated parking lane. O'Connor St is a major road that connects downtown to highway 417. While I do not have the data I would be shocked if the change to O'Connor St would have passed this proposal. I will admit that when I learned they were removing 2 lanes I thought for sure that the traffic which was already atrocious, was going to get substantially worse. However as someone who routinely drove down O'Connor during rush hour to get the 417 both before and after the rework, I can state from personal experience that the rework of street greatly improved the experience of driving on it. Even though the amount of lanes dedicated to driving went from 4 full lanes, during rush hour, to 2 lanes. I am now confident that the majority of traffic that I experienced on O'Connor during rush hour was primarily due to the ineffective parking restrictions that should have cleared the street at that time but were often ignored, causing 2 of the lanes to constantly need to merge back into the other 2 lanes. By converting one of these lanes to a dedicated bicycle lane it did not have the horrible effect on traffic I had forecast but instead made driving much better and more efficient! While this is only 1 road and 1 person's experience, I cannot believe that this is an isolated scenario. I have come to believe that the best way to clear up grid lock is to get people who don't need to be on the road for their trip off the roads.

So in conclusion, I believe that this proposal is both over reaching for the provincial government and short sighted. I do not believe the proposal will have the intended effect of reducing gridlock by preventing or removing bicycle lanes from replacing lanes of traffic. All it will do is make the lives more dangerous for 79% of the city who want to use a bicycle in some form and it will also make the lives worse for the other 21% of people in cars who now have to share the road with a slow cyclist.