Industrial design student at Humber, Ayan Abdullah, said she is often worried for her own safety on the road without bike lanes.
“There needs to be way more bike lanes,” she said. “Students can’t afford cars, they can afford a bike, maybe.”
Premier Doug Ford’s government’s new Bill 60 would prohibit municipalities from removing or narrowing existing car lanes to create dedicated cycling infrastructure.
Ontario’s Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing announced this proposal in Bill 60, the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, on Oct. 23.
Cycle Toronto’s executive director, Michael Longfield, said he couldn’t help but laugh every time he thinks about the bike lane proposal in Bill 60.
“I don't know if they were hoping that people wouldn’t be aware or that the rental pieces would drown out the bike lane piece or vice versa,” he said. “It’s a fairly cynical piece of legislation.”
University of Toronto data sciences professor, whose work focuses on bicycle infrastructure, Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher, said Bill 60 will affect a lot of plans for building a cycling network.
“The push to remove bike infrastructure or block bike infrastructure, especially on main roads, is really harmful to the creation of a cycle network,” she said.
Longfield said the polling Cycle Toronto has done has shown that people are supportive of bike lanes.
“Despite the fact that it’s often framed like a broader culture war,” despite seven in 10 Torontonians supporting building protected bike lanes, he said.
Bonsma-Fisher said main roads are often the only roads that go to places people want to go to and the removal or ban of bike lanes would affect that.
She said it makes sense to go down to two lanes where there are four-lane roads to make way for cyclists, despite Bill 60 proposing to ban it.
“Many people just don't have a driver's licence, and so this kind of ignores that whole huge section of the population that doesn't have to have equal access when we prioritize driving,” Bonsma-Fisher said.
Abdullah said that as a student, she can’t afford a car, but she could maybe afford a bike.
She said she was worried about the cyclist population decreasing if Bill 60 passes.
“I believe that bikes would get less and less, people wouldn’t have safe places to go,” she said. “The amount of road rage that would happen.”
Bonsma-Fisher said she could see a win-win for everyone by taking “a four-lane car road, making two lanes for cars, two lanes for bikes, parking, turning lights, everything else.
“So you're not losing access, right? You're not losing anything for cars, and in fact, when people who don't need to drive have options, traffic will get better overall,” she said.
Abdullah said even if cars saw the creation of bike lanes as a negative decision, she feels her life is worth the inconvenience.
She said she is a person who cycles to save money and take care of the environment, so without bike lanes, “you’re doing everything right and getting nothing in return, except endangerment.”
She said she has had a few close calls with cars while on her bike.
“Cars just don’t pay attention,” Abdullah said.
Tech design teacher at West Humber Collegiate and lifelong biker, Patrick Collins, said his sense of the city is from a bike seat.
He said the current bike lanes in Toronto are not planned out well.
“The way it’s been done is really goofy," Collins said. "The fact that it’s been done? It is really awesome. They’re heavily used.”
Collins said he will go out of his way to take bike lanes because he feels safer on them.
Bonsma-Fisher said biking is among the best ways to move people from one place to another.
“If they were thinking about efficient movement of people, all signs point to transit and cycling and walking as being the way to efficiently move people,” she said.
The City of Toronto did a pilot test by creating bike lanes on Bloor Street West, from Shaw Street to Runnymede Road, from 2016-2017.
It said the average total traffic volumes on Bloor Street West decreased 16 per cent.
The city said in 2020 and 2021, motor vehicle volumes went down an average of 24 per cent after the full implementation of the bike lanes.
“It's like a win-win. You get more people biking, they feel safe, but you're not seeing any kind of negative impact on traffic,” Bonsma-Fisher said.
“It's not clear to me that they are making these types of policies based on information and data, and a clear understanding of how those things relate,” she said.
Bonsma-Fisher said Bill 60 seems to be motivated by political goals “and the sentiments of people who tend to vote for them.”
Collins said Bill 60 is supposed to be about building housing, “and what he's done is add this anti-cycling thing on as an afterthought.
“That’s the impression I get from what I’ve read,” he said.
Ford said at a media conference on Sept. 23, 2024, that not allowing a bike lane when a lane of traffic has to be taken out would not decrease congestion is “hogwash.”
He said there are only four or five bikes on the road, while cars are backed up for kilometres.
“We have to focus on transportation to get people from point A to point B in quick fashion,” Ford said.
Longfield said banning bike lanes can sound like a good solution, but it’s not based on any data.
“Most people don't spend as much time as I do, or apparently the premier, thinking about bike lanes,” Lonfeild said. “It's not based on, frankly, any data that's actually within MTO itself.”
Bonsma-Fisher said before the bill, approval could be granted to create bike lanes that would take up a vehicle lane, but Bill 60 proposes an outright ban.
The Ontario government passed Bill 212 in November 2024. It said the minister has veto power over every new bike lane in Ontario and opens the door for it to dismantle existing ones.
“Bill 60 kind of makes explicit what was sort of implied by Bill 212,” Bonsma-Fisher said.
Cycle Toronto said on July 9 that an Ontario court ruled in favour of a temporary injunction that prevented the government from removing three bike lanes that Bill 212 had originally allowed.
“Our argument was, this was validated in the decision from the Superior Court of Ontario, the removal of these bike lanes was actually a violation of people's (Charter of Rights) Section 7 rights,” Longfield said.
He said that he's spent the past year trying to determine any good-faith reasons behind the premier and the government's decision to propose banning bike lanes.
"And again, certainly the way the minister talked about it last year did sort of imply that this would at least be some kind of collaboration, but what's been put forward with Bill 60, it seems like that none of that is true,” Longfield said.
Bonsma-Fisher, however, says that the proposed ban could see people find solutions to the issue.
“We might see some places getting creative with what they can do in the meantime,” she said.
