Doug Ford's dumb crusade against bike lanes will make Ontario slower

Ontario is a province filled with knowledge-economy workers, post-secondary institutions and other centres of intellectual capital and excellence. But if Premier Doug Ford keeps having his way, it will soon be known for being the dumbest place in Canada. His half-baked brainwave about building a massive (and massively expensive) tunnel under the 401 Highway, the spiteful closure of the Ontario Science Centre and the decision to bribe voters with their own money are all bad enough. And yet, his decision to attack bike lanes in the province just might top them all. 

Last week, Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria announced some proposed changes to how the Ford government permits and polices bike lanes. They will apparently include a requirement that cities where bike lanes have been installed in the last five years provide the province with data on the impact they’ve had on traffic flows. Adding a bunch of additional red tape is a weird look for a Conservative government that keeps telling voters it wants to reduce it, but this is the least stupid part of this very dumb situation.

In addition to restricting new bike infrastructure, the Ontario government is proposing to pay to remove existing lanes it previously helped fund. “It isn’t enough to keep an eye on future bike lanes,” Ford told an audience at Toronto’s Empire Club last week. “We need to and will remove and replace existing bike lanes on primary roads that are bringing traffic in our cities to a standstill.” 

Forget about inconveniences like public consultation or reviewing the available literature on bike lanes and their impact on congestion. Instead, Ford has already decided to rip up the bike lanes on major thoroughfares in Toronto like Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue in an obvious attempt to win over traffic-addled voters before an increasingly imminent provincial election. 

The political calculus here is blindingly obvious. Traffic congestion keeps getting worse in the GTA, and there are plenty of people who believe that bike lanes are contributing to this problem — including, quite clearly, the premier. Nick Kouvalis, a strategist and longtime adviser to Ford, claimed on social media that “public opinion polling — in Toronto — is 2 to 1 against those bike lanes.” It’s also safe to assume that Ford long ago lost the pro-bike demographic in Ontario and even safer to assume it isn’t large enough to move more than a riding or two, if that. 

But the facts, in as much as they matter, don’t back up the idea that removing bike lanes will do anything about traffic congestion. The theory of induced demand, which is well understood in urban planning circles (less so, it seems, in the premier’s office), stipulates that any additional increase in car-oriented infrastructure will inevitably be met by increased usage. As David Beitel, data services lead at Eco-Counter, a Montreal company that collects and analyzes pedestrian and bicycle traffic data, told the CBC, “for a short period of time, there might be a slightly improved [reduction], but within a year or two, or perhaps three, traffic is as bad or worse than it was before the lanes were added in the first place.”

The same is true, as it turns out, with bike lanes: if you build them, they will come. According to Shoshanna Saxe, an associate professor at the University of Toronto's department of civil and mineral engineering and Canada Research Chair in sustainable infrastructure, “if you put in more dedicated bike lanes, people tend to feel safer and demand for use increases.” 

There’s another phenomenon at work here called “traffic evaporation”, one that was studied in a 2001 paper that reviewed 70 road space reallocation cases involving multiple countries and testimonials from 200 traffic engineers and planners. It found that “people adjusted their behavior in ways that traffic models did not accurately predict. When lanes were reassigned from car traffic to higher-capacity modes — sidewalks, bike lanes and bus or rail lanes — traffic issues were less severe than expected, and traffic volumes were significantly reduced.”

More to the point, the real driver of congestion in Toronto isn’t bike lanes or the people traveling in them, but the combination of a massive increase in the region’s population and a massive failure to build the transit needed to move them around.  The Greater Toronto Area population is growing by approximately 100,000 people per year, and now sits at more than seven million. As Mayor Olivia Chow said on social media, “The congestion in this city is partially the result of the province's failure to deliver transit projects on time and has led to long construction delays and years of road closures."

She’s right. If the Ford government actually wants to address congestion, it should invest far more heavily in public transit and other modes and methods that take cars off the road. Ripping up bike lanes is just self-defeating Conservative virtue signaling, and even if it helps swing a few votes into Ford’s column it will come at the cost of Toronto’s reputation as a place where facts matter and evidence-based decision prevails.

Then again, Ford’s government seems about as interested in evidence-based decision making as carnivores are in plant-based food eating. At some point, you’d think Ontario voters might tire of that.