Nearly five years ago,…

Nearly five years ago, someone I knew was killed biking down a street in Toronto. Two years ago, a professor at my university was killed while they were biking. Before that, a teacher at a school in my neighbourhood was killed while cycling in the West End.

Each of these people left behind families and friends. Each of them should still be alive today.

Six other cyclists have been struck dead by traffic in Toronto in 2024 alone. Six people with grieving families.

It is easy, discussing legislation, to speak in abstractions. But I hope that every member of provincial parliament thinks carefully about the actual and specific consequences of this bill.

Every day thousands of Torontonians get on their bikes and go to work, go get groceries, go take their kids to school. For every bike lane this province removes, the odds that any of them never come home get higher.

I will leave it to others to comment on what this government could do with the tens of millions of dollars it intends to spend ripping out bike lanes, or to talk about how bike lanes improve local businesses, or to talk about the environmental benefits of biking, or to talk about induced demand, or all other ways that this bill is misguided.

But I hope that, just for a moment, this province’s legislators can put aside the platitudes and think about the actual lives that bike lanes can save — and could have saved. And then, I hope they think about the lives that this bill could cost.