Bill 212's provision…

Bill 212's provision requiring provincial approval of municipal bike lane installation and permitting the province to remove bike lanes on Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue in Toronto is wrong for many reasons:

1. More cyclists will die because they will be forced to ride in traffic with cars.
2. To battle climate change – and particularly in the old City of Toronto – we need to get more people out of cars and onto bikes or sidewalks. It does not make sense for the provincial government to enact policies that make it easier for automobiles to access the core of the city. Streets that are friendlier for pedestrians, for active transport and for the air that we breathe are the way to go.
3. Bike lanes improve commute times for car drivers. It gets bicycles out of car lanes and takes some cars off the road as people take up cycling who were previously deterred because of the dangers of cycling in car lanes. Premier Ford and his Transport Minister have claimed bike lanes slow automobile commute times without providing evidence. In fact, the explosion of bicycle and e-bike based delivery services in the city means one of two things: 1.) hundreds of people will lose their jobs, and hundreds of thousands of consumers and businesses will be inconvenienced as bike-based delivery becomes unviable, or 2.) there will be more accidents and automobile travel will be slowed further, and hundreds of thousands of consumers and businesses will be inconvenienced as bike-based delivery services are forced back into car lanes.
4. Tearing up existing lanes is a waste of taxpayer money. At least leave existing lanes on Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue in place.
5. It is yet another encroachment by the Ford government on municipal jurisdiction.

Government politicians frequently cite a statistic that only about 1% in Toronto ride bikes to work, but there are other measures. Taking just the City of Toronto (rather than the “census metropolitan area” that the 1% statistic is based on, about 2% use a bike as their main mode of commuting and 3.8% commute to work by bike sometimes. But not all cyclists are commuters. The latest (2016) Transportation Tomorrow Survey that the Ministry of Transport helps conduct shows that 26% of households in the old City of Toronto either bike or walk regularly (the two were grouped as one category).

The data show, as with so many things, that behaviours (and the appropriate policy responses) are not the same in the City of Toronto as elsewhere.

I just spent some time visiting major cities in Europe. Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels – everywhere, I saw well built out cycling infrastructure and high use rates. Against the argument that those cities don’t face our harsh winters, Scandinavian cities like Oslo and Stockholm also rank highly for cycling friendliness.

Surely, Ontario does not want to go backwards on cycling infrastructure. Surely, we want to look to a future where there are fewer cars on the roads causing gridlock and pollution and more people safely riding clean, community-building bicycles.

Leave decisions about cycling infrastructure in the hands of municipalities that know local needs best. And hands off the bike lanes on Bloor, Yonge and University!