As a registered planner with…

As a registered planner with OPPI and a former resident of Toronto, bike lanes are important for safety. I was nearly killed 2 times while riding my bicycle in Toronto on my daily activities because there were no bike lanes. It is extremely dangerous to ride a bike in Toronto due to parked cars opening their doors and having to navigate street car tracks. Bike lanes assure that at least part of the ride is safe and are encouraging for riders.

If you remove bike lanes, you are returning to a car-dominated planning strategy that frankly is outdated and regressive. We should be striving to achieve a scenario similar to Scandanavia where bikes are predominant, encouraging healthy living.

A better scenario than removing the bike lanes is to only have them operable in the summer months and shoulder seasons, and through signage allow cars or parking in the bike lanes in the winter. This may require a reconsideration of lane widths ... look to Vancouver as an example of narrower traffic lanes. You might also look at the bike lane construction in Calgary for inspiration.

Another scenario is to permit ebikes and escooters to use the bike lanes, which will relieve some of the traffic as commuters switch to these alternatives. You might also look to Hong Kong for inspiration, a city that has dedicated lanes for public transit and a very low percentage of cars. I lived and worked in this city, and was able to get to work in 45 minutes which included a 20 minute ferry, a quick walk, taking the trolley and then a 5-minute bus ride ... why was this possible? Because there are very few cars on the road, 90% or more of the vehicles are public transit. Hong Kong is a city of 7.5 million and a much denser urban population, but it is much better planned than Toronto and much less grid-lock.

Doubling up on the Garden city skyway is not the right solution. As a resident of St. Catharines, the only way that this will have any impact is if you increase the number of lanes on the QEW from Toronto to Niagara Falls. A better solution for the tourist traffic to Niagara Falls is to build a new highway south of the Escarpment as shown in the Greater Golden Horseshoe Plan, this is the only solution that will work. For those of us who live in Niagara, we do not want more lanes on the QEW.

I am strongly opposed to these two aspects in the proposed legislation. Reduced bike lanes and doubling the bridge size are short term solutions to a long-term problem ... and they are not even short-term because it will take a decade or more to construct either of them. I encourage the Ontario government to think ahead and spend money on public transit solutions rather than solutions for cars.