It seems ridiculous to have…

It seems ridiculous to have to reiterate this in 2024; Bike Lanes are essential transportation infrastructure for a major city like Toronto, and protect the safety of citizens who choose to use a bicycle to commute to their end destination. Riding a bicycle has low environmental impact, a positive impact on health, and, is often the quickest way to travel from point A to B in Toronto. There are countless pieces of evidence to support this, from studies, to looking at the infrastructure of great European cities, to simply looking at the number of cyclists quickly travelling to work in a bike lane at 8:30AM on a weekday.

Premier Doug Ford’s Bill 212 is an ill-informed assault on the free choice of Toronto citizens to safely bike to where they need to go. Ill informed as it pushes a car-centric ideology and rural point of view onto people who operate in Canada’s largest city, where the car is usually not the best option for transportation. Assault because would literally endanger the people who choose to bike if it were to be put in place, we need not look any further than the amount of cyclist deaths in the city in recent years – an example is Bloor Street, which is a proposed bike lane removal project, and a street that already has had a number of cyclist deaths.

My final comment is that it is a waste of money and time to rip up already established bicycle infrastructure – years of time and millions of tax dollars would be spent to destroy already thriving bike lanes.