Many others can tell you…

Many others can tell you more about transportation and traffic engineering than I can. I'm here to argue in favour not of bike lanes, but of evidence-based policy, or as I call it, "making sense."

Mr. Ford has pushed forward this bill because he doesn't like sitting in his chauffeured limousine on his way to Queen's Park and seeing other Torontonians pass him in the bike lane. I will support this statement.

We don't have any reason to think that Yonge, Bloor, or University will be faster without bike lanes. It's a complicated question, I know. But we know we don't have any reason to think Bill 212 will help anyone get around any particular congestion, because you haven't (not yet!) set up any mechanisms at the Ministry to gather information, evaluate pilot projects, establish decision criteria, and make decisions. You're just not in that business, are you? -- but cities are. Toronto, for instance, spent many years figuring out where the bike lanes should be to get the most riders safely across the street grid, while disrupting other road users the least. A whole staff of people, hundreds of consultations, multiple years. I wonder when you opened this file, Minister Sarkaria? Middle of September, no?

So the provincial government does not have evidence that tells us yes, we should tear out Bloor, Yonge, University, or any other bike lane, and return it to a mixture of bikes and cars. You don't have it.

So we're left with "Because Doug hates them" and “Because his friends asked” as the reasons why the province is interfering in municipal streetscape decisions. Surely it's not too different from the decision to defund and then shutter the Ontario Science Centre, or indeed his first act as premiere, breaking contracts with hundreds of wind and solar power producers in the province.

In all of these cases, we didn't make careful decisions based on understanding the problems or evaluating the evidence that should guide us. Nope, we just went with Doug's gut. It's not good enough -- one man's prejudices shouldn't guide important choices that affect the people of Ontario. This is just not how grown-ups make decisions, especially life or death decisions affecting how our citizens get to work or school every day.