Are you buying the city’s claim that removing the bike lanes ordered taken out by the province will cost $48 million? If the amount seems outrageous, that’s because it is nothing but a scare tactic by city staff who are as wedded to the idea of a bike lane on every street as Mayor Olivia Chow herself.
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Oh, and the staff report includes this claim, that there will be “minimal improvements in travel time once lanes are removed.”
Premier Doug Ford has heard enough about bike lanes from residents of this city and others and has had enough. His legislation stops cities from installing bike lanes on major roads if the bike lanes remove any traffic lanes for cars.
He’s also promised to remove “sections of the Bloor Street, Yonge Street, and University Avenue bike lanes,” according to a consultation proposal that started last month and concludes next week.
It’s time for these lanes to go and for the city to go back to the policy of bike lanes on secondary roads, not major arterial ones. This report with the flashy price tag is meant to scare residents into agreeing to leave the lanes in rather than spend so much money.
Councillor Brad Bradford, an avid cyclist but one who opposes the city’s overly zealous bike lane approach, has serious doubts about the cost.
“The city’s $48-million cost estimate for removing the bike lanes raises a lot of questions given that it’s nearly double the cost of installation. That must have generously include every paperclip and shovel they could possibly account for,” Bradford said.
He’s also doubting the idea of major construction delays by taking the bike lanes out.
“The Bloor West lanes in Etobicoke are just paint and flexi-posts, and those could be removed a lot faster and for a lot less cost than staff are claiming. Probably could done overnight, over the course of a weekend,” he said.
Former councillor and Deputy Mayor Denzil Minan-Wong also has real doubts about the costs and exaggerated nuisance of removing the nuisance bike lanes.
“I think the number is inflated. If it’s going to cost that much money, maybe the province can come in and do it for it,” he said.
Minan-Wong pointed to the roughly $270,000 cost of removing the Jarvis bike lane, a project he initiated in 2011. Sure, costs have risen since then but not by that much. City staff is having us on with this sky-is-falling projection.
To be blunt, city staff can’t be trusted on this issue.
The shoddy report in 2023 on the “pilot project” for the bike lanes on Yonge St. north of Bloor is proof of that. Faced with complaints from local residents about reduced wait times of emergency vehicles, the city’s staff report claimed this was false, just a delay of a few seconds.
To arrive at that conclusion, they didn’t look at the landlocked streets between Price and Jackes. They included a wide area from Avenue Rd. in the west to Mount Pleasant in the east.
“We feel trapped — and have very legitimate, very grave concerns regarding how dramatically EMS response times have been impacted. Basically this is a tragedy waiting to happen,” local resident James in an email to me this week on the subject.
He and his neighbours are worried that another shoddy report from city staff will keep these bike lanes in place.
Thankfully, the province isn’t buying it.
“As we’ve said many times,1% of people shouldn’t be making decisions for the majority of people who travel on our busiest roads and sit in gridlock every day,” said Dakota Brasier, director of media relations for Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria.
That message will be quite welcome to the majority of Toronto residents who have had enough with the city’s poor planning and delivery on bike lanes.