As a frequent user of bike…

As a frequent user of bike lanes in Toronto I strongly disagree with this proposed legislation. I am also a car owner and driver. I do not think anyone should expect to drive into downtown Toronto and think they have a right to free-flowing, car-dominated streets. That is anti-thetical to city-building. I work downtown, but would not commute to work by car, and noone should expect to have an easy time doing so. Congestion is the mark of a successful city. I use the Danforth, Bloor and Yonge bike lanes. I take my son to school using a bike using these bike lanes. It will absolutely not be safe to do so without the lanes. In many cases there are not any reasonable alternative routes that would not dramatically increase the trip time, difficulty or safety or the trip.

This legislation is moving Toronto into the past, and will impact it's status on the world stage. New York City is full of new bike lanes. Montreal is full of bike lanes. Toronto wants to be a world-class city. People will visit and try to bike around and realize what an unsafe disaster it is. This legislation is not world-class, it's embarrassing. Cities are places to live, work and play. A city whose streets are built simply for moving traffic through them is not a real city, it's just a place people pass on their way to somewhere else. It's nowhere.

This legislation is anti-democratic and overreach. Everyone knows Doug Ford lost the election for Mayor of Toronto and can't get over it. Now he wants to tell us how we should design our streets? That is not local democracy, it's picking on the most vulnerable road users for political points with his base.

The government is using old, misleading and inappropriate statistics to justify removing these bike lanes. They are demanding data to support keeping bike lanes that are in place, but where is the data to justify taking them out? Apparently, unreleased government data suggests nearly 10% of all trips in the city that end in downtown Toronto are taken by bike or other micromobility vehicle. I wouldn't be surprised if that is true.

Numerous new high-rise buildings in Toronto have been built with minimal or even no vehicular parking on the assumption that a bike lane network would support cycling use, with huge numbers of bike parking spaces instead of car parking spaces. How is the increased density going to be supported in the current street network if new residents are being encouraged to drive by ripping out bike lanes? Show us the transportation studies that show that that will work and allow the City to meet the government's own growth targets?

On streets like Bloor, Yonge and the Danforth before the bike lanes, there was no parking allowed during rush hour - that is the only way there was an additional lane of traffic. These are the city's main retail streets - do you think it's good for business to have no parking allowed in front of your business from 3pm to 6 or 7pm and the street turned into a highway for cars passing through? There's a reason the Annex BIA is strongly supportive of the bike lanes there - they are actually good for business!

Lastly, on some of these downtown streets, adding a vehicular lane will only increase the number of cars - it's called induced demand, and anyone who knows anything about transportation planning knows what that means: when it comes to traffic, if you add a lane, more people will try to drive and the congestion will just return. In addition, increasing capacity on some of these streets will just increase the volumes of cars making it to key choke points like the DVP and Gardiner - they have no capacity for the additional vehicles from additional lanes of traffic.

Cyclists need more protection, not less. We should be encouraging cycling, not discouraging it by ripping out bike lanes. Please don't take away the safety bike lanes give me and my son on our trip to save drivers a few minutes of commuting time.