Once again we have a bill…

Once again we have a bill that undermines the importance of developing mobility options for everyone, in favour of temporary wins for drivers. Along with highway upgrades, this bill demonstrates a lack of understanding of the time-tested fact of induced demand and falls prey to fallacies that have plagued highway projects for years (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/highway-robbery/). The sprawl of suburbia and zoning restrictions are the real contributors to our traffic woes (https://medium.com/@SullivanIsrael/this-map-says-it-all-3fcbdd05bf9b). Anecdotally, I don't want to drive - I want to get where I need to go quickly and efficiently. That's a notion that holds true for the majority of Ontarians.

When we compare the usage of our roads vs bike lanes, it's very important to consider the incompleteness of our bike network. Imagine if that same incompleteness was present in our road network, people would opt for whatever transit mode was most efficient. We need to reduce our dependance on cars. Invest in multimodal forms of transit to build an efficient complete network that doesn't rely on cars - bike lanes are an important part of that. Car driven development is not just bad for people without cars, but cities themselves. Ignoring the impact of sprawl on our utilities, the impact of increased vehicle traffic is bad for our businesses. When people are on foot, commuting by public transit or biking, they engage with local businesses. Drivers tunnel-vision on their destination, do not engage with local business, cost our province billions, and are responsible for more than 100 thousand minor, major injuries and deaths in Canada alone (https://tc.canada.ca/en/road-transportation/statistics-data/canadian-mo…). When we just look around, it's so obvious that better solutions exist. We need bike lanes. We need to invest in our public transit. We need to make it just as convenient to use multimodal forms of transit as driving. We can and we should! Let's not set ourselves back again. That would be stupid.