The premier’s at it again,…

The premier’s at it again, attacking Toronto, where he lost the race for mayor in 2014 and where his party doesn’t even have a single MP (downtown anyway). Toronto has rejected him and yet he still seems to imagine that he’s the mayor and keeps on intervening in ways that’re very unwelcome. Now he has set his sites on our bike lane infrastructure, which has always been a municipal issue. He drives around in his SUV raging about the bike lanes, and he gets a few texts and calls on his personal cell phone from people who don’t like them either, so he decides he’s going to show us all how tough he is by ripping them out and orders the minister to make that happen. Doesn’t matter what the real data shows about how many people use them and how important they are to the city, how they save lives and have a negligible affect on car traffic, he’s going to do it anyway. It’s a complete nonissue, just another useless initiative that the premier has come up with that helps no one and is just a waste of money. These 3 particular bike lanes at issue (on Bloor, Yonge and University) were built after years of planning and at great expense, and now the premier has decided that he knows better than all the city planners and duly elected councilors. The arrogance and ignorance on display here is staggering and infuriating. He knows nothing about bike lane infrastructure or city planning, doesn’t ride a bike himself as he drives everywhere in his SUV, and now he’s going to come crashing down on the city with such an arbitrary, destructive and unnecessary move such as this. It's a brazen act of vandalism against our city’s cycling infrastructure and all part of the premier’s implacable need to go after the downtown “lefties” who don’t support him. Removing these bike lanes isn’t a priority for anyone else in the province, and yet he still puts his time and energy into something so useless and destructive as this pathetic scheme. The premier and the minister better present some real data and evidence to show that these bike lanes are actually slowing down traffic and causing gridlock, instead of just saying it over and over again and presenting nothing. Just because the premier says that the bike lanes are causing “absolute gridlock” and "bringing traffic to a standstill" doesn’t make it true. In fact there’s no evidence supporting what they say and it’s actually quite the opposite. The premier can try to frame this bill as “getting you moving” all he wants but it isn’t going to get anyone moving, it’s only going to slow down traffic as the lanes are ripped out and lead to more accidents between cars and cyclists. The removal of these bike lanes has the potential to get people killed. The minister cited some dubious figures to justify this move, saying “1.2%” of commuters use bikes, which’s just false and there’s no way that’s true. That data’s from 2011, before the bike lanes were built, and it encompasses the entire GTA, large swaths of which have no bike lanes and few riders, rather than just Toronto, which’s where we should be focusing on when talking about these 3 bike lanes that you’re now targeting. Since 2011, there’s also been a massive increase in food delivery couriers on bikes, e-bikes and Bike Share Toronto trips on the city’s streets. So the minister’s knowingly presenting bad, outdated data to mislead the people. He says it’s “common sense” that the bike lanes should be removed, but it damn well isn’t common sense when these bike lanes were only just built, some with very complex designs and at great expense, and they’re very useful to a lot of people everyday, and now out of nowhere you’re going to rip them out and waste a whole bunch of time and money in the process. The minister apparently commutes to work by car from Brampton, while he probably doesn’t ever ride a bike either and has no use for bike lanes. What experience with or knowledge of urban cycling infrastructure does he have that renders him qualified to make these decisions? Because this is truly one of the stupidest initiatives imaginable, to rip out perfectly fine cycling infrastructure that was only recently built for no reason. I want to see the evidence that these 3 bike lanes are causing “absolute gridlock” as the premier says. The premier’s clearly lying here because there’s no “absolute gridlock” in the city. If there were then that’d mean that nobody’d be moving at all, and this certainly wouldn’t be caused by a few bike lanes. Where’re the studies and reports about how these bike lanes are negatively affecting car traffic? I don’t take the premier’s word for it, not at all, because he lies and exaggerates about everything. The CBC recently published an article online fact checking his various claims about bike lanes and showed it all to be false, everything he has said is factually wrong. The bike lane on Bloor St. is beautifully designed and working very smoothly. It’s a masterpiece. There’s room for two lanes of traffic for both cars and bikes and even room for parking. I use it regularly and I can tell you that it’s a great piece of infrastructure for the city. It keeps cars and bikes separated and out of each other’s way. What don’t you understand about why that’s a good thing? The Bloor-Annex BIA is trying to tell the premier and the minister in no uncertain terms that the bike lanes have been great for business on Bloor because people on bikes stop and buy stuff, while people in cars just drive on through. Is Bloor St. supposed to be merely a highway for cars or is it a street where people can stop and interact in the community? Why doesn’t the minister pay a visit to the Annex neighborhood and speak to some of the business owners there and view the bike lanes in action? Instead of making such a blunt force arbitrary decision with no consultation with any of the local stakeholders. The minister says the province will “reimburse” the city for the removal of the bike lanes. Well, they should also pay for the design work and installation of them because that was a very costly and time-consuming process. I for one hope that the city will refuse to have anything to do with this folly and will not cooperate in any way. The city should refuse to remove the bike lanes and then we’ll see what the province can do about that. Because this is an outrageous intrusion into municipal affairs, and any directive coming from the province to remove the bike lanes should be ignored by the city.