A cyclist rides on the designated Bloor Street bike lane in Toronto on Oct. 12, 2017.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Just when you thought Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government didn’t have any more scandalous ideas on how to ease Toronto’s crippling gridlock, the province comes out with this gem: a proposal to rip out bike lanes.
On the bright side, it will be a lot less expensive than his $60-billion plan to build a car tunnel under Highway 401. But ripping out bikes lanes isn’t exactly cheap. The Premier’s late brother Rob Ford found that out during his time as Toronto’s mayor, when the city ripped up bikes lanes on Jarvis Street. It cost an estimated $280,000 to $300,000 to remove the lanes, which had cost $86,000 to install.
“We need to, and will, remove and replace existing bike lanes on primary roads that are bringing traffic in our cities to an absolute standstill,” Doug Ford said in a recent speech at the Empire Club of Canada. Then, last Thursday, the province updated its proposed legislation, adding a requirement to remove sections of bike lanes on Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue in order to give the space back to cars.
Previously, Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria had said lanes wouldn’t be removed until the province had received traffic data from the city. Now it seems the data doesn’t matter; Doug Ford’s government wants the lanes gone.
Apart from the fact that ripping out bike lanes is a waste of taxpayer money, it simply won’t do the one thing that Doug Ford says it will do. Removing cycling infrastructure to give cars another lane won’t ease congestion in the long run.
“To say giving more space to cars can solve congestion, that just does not work. That is world-is-flat stuff,” said Shoshanna Saxe, an associate professor at the University of Toronto in the department of civil and mineral engineering, who studies sustainable infrastructure. “The consensus is that bike lanes are a critical tool for reducing congestion and increasing mobility. So, no, they don’t cause congestion. Cars cause congestion.”
Bikes lanes also save lives. Taking them out, she added, will not just put cyclists at greater risk of serious injury and death, but also pedestrians and even other drivers, who tend to drive more calmly when bike lanes are present.
In his email newsletter, City Hall Watcher, the Toronto Star’s Matt Elliott, offered a thorough rundown of the city’s existing data on the effect of bike lanes. CBC also did a story looking at the evidence. None of it indicates that Doug Ford’s proposal to rip out bikes lanes is a good long-term (or even short-term) fix for frustrated drivers.
Ford has also said bike lanes belong on secondary roads, rather than primary ones. Sometimes, yes, side roads are better (as is the case with Toronto’s Shaw Street bike lane). In other circumstances, primary roads are the best option (as is the case with Bloor Street, where there is no good east-west alternative). Again, researchers have already crunched the data on this too.
“To ride on safe infrastructure, [cyclists] will tolerate about a 20-per-cent ride out of their way,” Saxe said. Anything more than that and cyclists will either just ride on the primary streets anyway or get back in their cars, she said.
The bottom line is that dedicating more space to cars doesn’t work. “We’ve tried it. If that worked, we would never have had congestion in the first place. You cannot build car lanes or expand space for cars [to build your way] out of congestion,” Saxe said.
“There’s two ways to solve congestion,” she continued. “One, dramatic economic collapse; two, more active transport and more public transport.”
While the pandemic certainly emptied the highways and got traffic flowing, no one wants a repeat of the “dramatic economic collapse” option. So that means we’re looking at human-powered transport (walking or biking) and public transport.
Given the overwhelming evidence and academic consensus that bikes lanes help to ease congestion rather than cause it, it appears that Doug Ford’s government wants to rip out bike lanes not because it’s good policy but because it plays to his base. It plays to suburban commuters, who are fed up with sitting in traffic and tired of waiting for better public transit. He’s got little to lose making downtown Torontonians angry; the city hasn’t exactly been a hotbed of Conservative support.
Ripping out existing bike lanes is an expensive way to pander to voters though. Then again, so is dolling out $200 cheques to Ontario taxpayers ahead of a possible early election.
What’s it going to take for people to realize that making life harder and more dangerous for cyclists isn’t going to make life any easier for drivers? The next provincial election, perhaps?