I'm a car owner and bike…

I'm a car owner and bike owner living in east-central Toronto with two elementary school aged kids. I own a business that is about 1.5km from my house. Recently our family bought a new car, and were debating whether to keep our old car which still ran well and be a two car family which would be convenient in some situations. We decided to sell the second car and be a one car family, and at the same time I have purchased an electric bike which makes commuting by bike easier, especially for longer commutes. I sometimes use my electric bike and sometimes my regular one. I find with my work close by and most things I need to do close by, I am able to commute by bike and not use the car. I have also started commuting by bike to visit my elderly parents, who live about 7km away and need extra support. I feel like I am benefiting the city in many ways by biking, including benefiting other drivers by keeping one less car off the road. There is one less car parked on the street. There is less pollution in the air. I note that in Toronto there were periods of extremely unhealthy air quality in the summer, a problem which I believe is going to persist and whose detrimental health effects are hugely underestimated. If you think about living in a place where we can't breathe the air, alarm bells should be sounding.

I have started studying transportation and thinking about transportation systems and one thing that is striking is just how space efficient bikes are. The key thing we need is SAFE and CONNECTED biking infrastructure. This is what I would love to have. And if we did have that, it would enable a much larger percentage of the population to bike, especially in the city, which would take the pressure off of traffic. I regularly do not bike with my kids, because I don't think its safe. We alone would forgo many car trips if the bike lanes were safer and connected. We could make the city much healthier, safer, and transportation more efficient, including for cars, if we had a real connected biking infrastructure and also take pressure off of land use for parked cars by reducing the need for people to own cars or multiple cars. Our province would benefit the most from a bold and visionary approach to transportation rather than to dig in to try to maintain the status quo which is clearly just getting worse and worse.