Doug Ford is about to rip up Toronto's bike lanes. This will kill people.
People will get seriously hurt by this. Doug Ford knows, and does not care.
Once again, Doug Ford is using his position as Premier of Ontario to accomplish what he’s always wanted: Destroy the City of Toronto, literally rip apart our streets, and inflict suffering upon every single one of us.
This is what he and his late brother did at City Hall while the latter was our mayor. This is what he wanted to do when he ran for Mayor himself in 2014, and he was defeated by John Tory. And this is now what we are stuck with, as long as Ontario keeps giving him the unlimited power to ruin our lives.
We have a Premier who helps Toronto build very little, and who comes to us only when he wants to stop us from doing something good. Any good thing that he does allow has to have his name on it, never ours, and you will probably have to buy it at Shoppers Drug Mart from Galen Weston. It’s pathetic behaviour from a pathetic man.
Now, Doug Ford’s pettiness has extended to Toronto’s bike lanes. Etobicoke voters are bitter about the Bloor Street bike lines, and Doug Ford, acting more as MPP for Etobicoke North than as Premier, decided he’s going to rapidly pass an enabling act, for one sole purpose.
He will rip apart the fully-built bike lanes that Toronto has built on Bloor Street, on Yonge Street, and on University Avenue. He will send construction crews in, like he did to Ontario Place, and to the Science Centre, and he will tear it to shreds. And Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow is unwilling to do anything to fight him other than sternly wag her finger in disapproval.
To start, let’s get the biggest misconception out of our way: Bike lanes were not built to allow people to ride bicycles on the street. Bike lanes were built to allow people to safely ride bicycles on the street, the street that they have always legally used.
According to Ontario law, cyclists cannot legally ride a bike on the sidewalk. You are required to cycle on the road, not the sidewalk, and operate within vehicular traffic. Motorists have descended into an absurd fiction of a reality, in which they believe that bicycles do not belong in the place they are legally mandated to be. Deeply unserious behaviour.
Removing bike lanes will not take cyclists off the road. Sure, some of these people will opt to take public transit on Line 1 and Line 2 underground…but many will need to take the bus instead, and that bus operates in road traffic.
Many cyclists, for whom public transit may be non-viable, will have to get in bulky, large cars. While previously their journey would have been safe or reliable with a bike lane, they have now been forced back into cars, and will contribute to traffic themselves.
Finally, many cyclists will simply return to what they did before bike lanes; they will go back into normal traffic lanes. While the safety of bike lanes makes cycling more popular, there are a plethora of cyclists who will, quite rightly, continue to ride their bicycle regardless of the hurdles that motorists try to throw in their way. If they can’t have a bike lane, they’ll go in front of your car with their bicycle instead.
In none of these cases do these people simply disappear. All the same people remain in the area, and they all still need to get from Point A to Point B. It is plainly obvious that taking people off small and compact bicycles to put them in bigger cars will make traffic worse, not better!
There will be more cars and more bikes in standard road lanes now that the bike lanes will be removed. There will be more people who need to take the bus and the tram and the metro who could have taken the bicycle before, and that means public transit will become much more crowded!
But to be quite frank, whether bike lanes increase car traffic, or make things worse for drivers, is not a concern for me in the slightest. Bike lanes do not exist to help drivers, but bike lanes do exist because of drivers.
Bike lanes exist to protect cyclists from being killed by drivers.
The City of Toronto has installed protected bike lanes along Bloor Street in phases, since a pilot in 2016. Under Mayor Tory, the city opted to make these cycle tracks permanent one year later, and they have gradually expanded westward from Avenue Road above Queen’s Park, to Resurrection Road in Etobicoke.
After the initial pilot, safety increased dramatically in the area where protected bike lanes had been installed. Cars hitting bikes dropped 61%, cars hitting people dropped 55%, and notably, cars hitting other cars dropped 71%. Overall, there was a 44% decrease in collisions across the board.
The road became safer not merely for cyclists and for pedestrians, but for every car too. Stress upon Line 2 was lowered, exactly as you would predict, and as a side benefit, the introduction of bike lanes increased spending at local businesses along Bloor Street. This is what convinced the City of Toronto to expand the Bloor Street bike lanes, and also begin construction on University Avenue too.
On University Avenue, the CBC reports that neither emergency services nor any hospital on Hospital Row have raised concerns about the bike lanes. Indeed, these bike lanes can be used by Wheel Trans vehicles to drop off and pick up passengers, many of whom frequently need to visit Hospital Row as patients.
Let us be perfectly clear: Doug Ford is only targeting bike lanes as a concession to the NIMBYite, car-brained fervour of his supporters. But those supporters do not represent the mass public as a whole, and the mass public should not have our safety threatened by their random whims.
The Ford Government’s new policy will increase the number of pedestrians and cyclists who get hurt and killed on public roads. Pedestrians and cyclists alike will be obliterated into paste by arrogant drivers who think speeding through a red light entitles them to take a human life. Put very simply, removing the bike lanes in Toronto will kill people. I have no tolerate for people who pretend it won’t.
Doug Ford will say that the bike lanes are in the “wrong place,” but there is no wrong place to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe from cars. Doug Ford does not have empathy for cyclists, and it would be a fool’s errand to naively expect him to change his mind if presented with the right logic.
So for cyclists, I would suggest a different course of action. Do not attempt to convince Doug Ford or his supporters that you are correct, because they will not show empathy. Instead of persuasion, simply apply pressure where it hurts, as other anti-Ford protestors have done before you.
Mass protest has been the only tactic to show any signs of success against Doug Ford, and cyclists should shape their public demonstration accordingly. If current public demonstrations are not succeeding with Ford, it is because they have not effectively applied pressure in targeted ways to Ford’s soft targets.
If cyclists went to Queen’s Park Crescent in large numbers, and simply rode around Queen’s Park in a loop, they could easily block all the driveways to the Legislative Assembly, making it difficult for any vehicle to enter or leave Queen’s Park. And this would instantly make Doug Ford’s life more difficult, while staying well within the boundaries of legal protest.
After all, he certainly won’t be taking the TTC to Queen’s Park and mingling with us unwashed masses, so he wouldn’t be able to use the metro station’s underground entrance to the legislature. He would have to have his OPP detail park his vehicle further away at another government building, and escort him through the provincial government’s tunnel network, on foot.
I’ve been walking through those tunnels under Queen’s Park since I was a young kid. Imagine Toronto’s PATH network, but for politicians, their staffers, and public servants. The tunnels are a fun novelty to walk through when you’ve never done them before, and technically visitors aren’t allowed to enter them at all.
But they’re also very long, and winding, and the air in there is pretty stale and a little hard to breathe. It’s something people will use when the winter is pretty bad, but otherwise staffers appreciate the fresh air and the sun. It’s not a place people actively choose to spend their time on a daily basis.
So if Doug Ford had to trudge through those tunnels, every single day, without OPP being able to just drop him off at the rear of the legislature like they normally do?
Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t be very happy. I’m sure he would find the pressure uncomfortable, and perhaps that would be persuasive.
Anyway. Food for thought.