The proposed bill should be…

The proposed bill should be rejected outright as not based on a proper assessment of the evidence and the costs and benefits of bike lanes, including: their impact on congestion, on human health and safety, on air quality, on accessibility and fairness (not everyone can or wants to drive), the costs of construction and maintenance relative to vehicle lanes, and on the capacity to move people within a given area.

The proposal focuses on congestion, and there are multiple peer reviewed analyses from cities around the world that demonstrate bike lanes may actually *reduce* congestion.

1. "Bicycle Infrastructure and Traffic Congestion: Evidence from DC's Capital Bikeshare" published in Resources for the Future[1]:
a. This study found that the availability of bikeshare reduces traffic congestion by up to 4% within a neighborhood in Washington, DC.
b. The congestion-reducing impact is concentrated in highly congested areas.
2. A study from Carnegie Mellon University focused on Seattle[3]:
a. Found that replacing 10% of short car trips with micromobility options like e-bikes could eliminate over 4,800 car trips during peak afternoon travel.
b. This would decrease vehicle miles traveled by over 7,300 miles a day, resulting in a 2.76% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
3. "Do Safe Bike Lanes Really Slow Down Cars? A Simulation-Based Study of Suburban Road Networks" published in PMC[5]:
a. Used traffic simulations to model the impact of adding bike lanes to suburban streets.
b. Found that selectively including safe cycling lanes on some streets led to only a 7% increase in average car travel times in the worst-case scenario.
c. Demonstrated that reasonable compromises are possible to make suburbs safer for cyclists without significantly impacting vehicle traffic.

These academic publications provide empirical evidence and simulation-based studies that generally support the notion that bike lanes do not significantly increase congestion and can even help reduce it in some cases.

Sources:
[1] Bicycle Infrastructure and Traffic Congestion: Evidence from DC's ... https://www.rff.org/publications/journal-articles/bicycle-infrastructur…
[2] Over and Over, Studies Show Bike Lanes Don’t Cause Congestion https://www.planetizen.com/news/2024/10/132237-over-and-over-studies-sh…
[3] Study: More Bike Lanes Needed to Reduce Traffic Congestion https://www.govtech.com/fs/study-more-bike-lanes-needed-to-reduce-traff…
[4] Do bike lanes really cause more traffic congestion? Here's what the research says https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/bike-lanes-impacts-1.7358319
[5] Do Safe Bike Lanes Really Slow Down Cars? A Simulation-Based ... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8997564/

Even where bike lanes have been installed in Toronto in particular, they are not installed before extensive study of their impact on traffic. There is NO evidence that cycle tracks are a significant cause of congestion during peak hours. A search of the internet did not yield a single study supporting that conclusion.

This bill should be replaced with a bill to further support and encourage cycling, which could include such things as: ensuring that bike lanes form a network that connects major destinations and do not abruptly end before reaching those destinations, ensuring there is secure storage for bicycles at major destinations (e.g. train stations, transit stations, schools, etc.), and measures to reduce bicycle theft.

Measures to reduce congestion might include: reducing the space and duration requirements for taking up roads for staging of construction materials through better project management and more efficient storage, coordinating road repair work across parallel routes, intelligent traffic management systems, enforcement of traffic regulations (particularly around blocking of intersections), congestion pricing, restricting parking (on-street and generally) and further enhancing public transit alternatives.