I am submitting this comment…

I am submitting this comment to state my strong opposition to Bill 60, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, 2025, specifically the section that prohibits municipalities from reducing motor-vehicle lanes, including for installing cycling infrastructure, transit priority measures, and other complete-street improvements.

This provision is excessively broad and deeply counter-productive. As drafted, it would prevent municipalities from reallocating road space for urgently needed safety and mobility projects, including protected bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, queue-jump lanes, transit-priority corridors, and even dedicated LRT guideways. These are essential tools for improving road safety, reducing congestion, supporting economic growth, and providing efficient, low-carbon transportation alternatives. Blocking all lane reallocations, regardless of context, evidence, or local planning, will worsen the very delays and inefficiencies the bill claims to address.

The legislation also undermines decades of transportation planning best practice. Road space reallocation is a proven method for reducing serious injuries, improving traffic flow predictability, and increasing the person-moving capacity of busy corridors. Transit priority lanes carry far more people per hour than general-purpose vehicle lanes; preventing them directly suppresses the growth of high-capacity, cost-effective transit. Likewise, protected bike lanes dramatically reduce collision risk while enabling more residents to choose affordable and sustainable travel options. These outcomes should be encouraged, not prohibited.

Bill 60 is also fundamentally misaligned with Ontario’s commitments to Vision Zero, climate mitigation, and public health. Municipalities rely on the ability to redesign streets in order to meet their road safety targets and to shift trips toward cleaner transportation modes. The bill would freeze outdated road designs in place and make it illegal for municipalities to respond to modern safety data, mode-shift goals, or changing land-use patterns.

Furthermore, the bill represents an unnecessary and inappropriate intrusion into local governance. Municipalities have the expertise, planning frameworks, and community input processes required to design streets tailored to their local needs. Stripping municipalities of their authority to reallocate road space undermines transportation master plans, climate strategies, and years of public engagement, while wasting prior investment.

The prohibition on lane reductions is not only harmful, it is unworkably broad. It prevents evidence-based safety improvements, blocks transit expansion, restricts municipal autonomy, and contradicts provincial goals on congestion, emissions, and long-term growth management.

I strongly urge the government to withdraw this section of Bill 60 in its entirety. Ontario should empower municipalities to build safer, more efficient, and higher-capacity transportation networks not hinder them with sweeping prohibitions that block active transportation, transit priority lanes, and dedicated LRT projects.

Please reject this harmful and counter-productive measure and restore municipalities’ ability to design streets that meet the needs of their communities.