When it comes to municipal politics, few issues make for a more effective wedge than bike lanes.
Toronto’s mayoral aspirants have so far struggled to capture the public’s imagination, and most have relied largely on what soul sensation James Brown termed a “talking loud but saying nothing” electoral strategy. Instead of focusing on bolder proposals to improve Torontonians’ lives, the candidates find themselves having a bizarre debate about whether or not ripping up bike lanes during the climate emergency is a good idea.
Debating bike lanes is smart strategic politicking even if it is a terrible policy decision. In no uncertain terms, every city in North America needs as many bike lanes as they can possibly build, as fast as they can possibly build them. No exceptions. This isn’t just my opinion: it’s the conclusion of urban planners, environmentalists, traffic engineers, and a wide spectrum of other experts, who have been saying the same thing for decades.
In all the ways that Toronto is an exceptional city, it is not exceptional in this regard: it, too, needs as much biking infrastructure as can possibly be built.
If you’re having a hard time deciding who to vote for, let me make it easy for you: anyone advocating removing bike lanes from any part of the city should be immediately disqualified. They are not a serious candidate — they simply do not understand fundamental aspects of how cities work.
An anti-bike-lane mayoral candidate is as useful to the city of Toronto as a flat-Earther would be at NASA.
One of the reasons the bike lanes debate is an effective wedge issue is actually a reflection of how dominant cars are in our society. Unlike cities elsewhere in the world, North American cities were largely committed to radical car-centric transformations beginning after the Second World War. What might be completely unthinkable in cities elsewhere around the world — such as destroying entire neighbourhoods to make way for highways or ripping up perfectly good tram lines — was commonplace throughout the middle decades of the 20th century.
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The immediate consequence of destroying viable public-transit systems and neighbourhoods for suburban-bound highways was, as predicted, a radical depopulation of urban centres. Add incremental deindustrialization into the mix, and you have a recipe for disaster, one whose traces are still evident in myriad American cities.
While Canadian cities didn’t experience the same processes to quite the same degree, our cities became just as car-centric. An unfortunately large segment of the population is now so used to having every aspect of transportation infrastructure geared toward their needs, they’re completely incapable of considering any other means of getting around.
This doesn’t mean things can’t change — and quickly.
Up until quite recently, North America was entirely geared toward accommodating the needs of another source of deadly emissions: the smoker. There was plenty of opposition to enforcing strict anti-smoking ordinances, and it was ultimately a combination of focused activism and our human desire to live unencumbered by emphysema, asthma, and lung cancer that won out over the protestations of those among us who’d rather not be inconvenienced for the greater good.
I suspect the tide is similarly turning on the matter of bike lanes.
With that in mind, it’s vital that we dissect some of the more pernicious arguments against bike lanes — ones that return time and again despite rigorous debunking.
Bike lanes do not increase congestion
Bike lanes have a greater passenger capacity than lanes for vehicular traffic. The average single lane of private motor-vehicle traffic has a capacity of between 600 and 900 vehicles per hour, representing between 600 and 1,800 people (and it’s closer to the lower end of that range because most cars have but a single occupant).
By contrast, the average two-way protected bike lane (which typically occupies less space than a single lane of traffic), has a capacity of 7,500 people per hour.
That’s right: a single two-way protected bike lane can move about 10 times as many people, and do so using less space, than a single lane of car traffic. A roughly similar amount of space dedicated to parking might serve fewer than 800 people per hour.
Why bike lanes don't make traffic worse
So any mayoral candidate interested in decreasing traffic congestion should therefore advocate for radically and immediately increasing the total number of kilometres of protected bike lanes.
Congestion isn’t just a problem of people not getting where they need to go in a timely manner; it’s also a problem of pollution and emissions. Congested traffic is a major source of the carbon-dioxide emissions that are fuelling the climate emergency. In compact urban environments, the negative climatological and public-health impacts from car congestion are widespread. Protected bike lanes don’t just help decongest — they help decarbonize and improve public health and fitness.
Bike lanes are good for business
A common yet utterly debunked argument against bike lanes is that, because they often replace street parking, they are therefore bad for small businesses. I always thought this was a particularly ridiculous argument, given that most cars travel too fast for most drivers to get a good look at what’s inside a shop window.
The argument that urban businesses need ample street parking to survive tends to reflect the transformation enforced on cities dating back to the middle decades of the 20th century. Put another way, Canada’s cities all had viable commercial arteries before cars became affordable and commonplace, so the availability of street parking wouldn’t seem to be what makes or breaks a business’s viability.
People who use bikes as their primary means of conveyance are in fact better stimulators of local businesses than are people in cars. A recent study from Transport for London provides some truly jaw-dropping insightinto just how much economic stimulus can be created by re-orienting city streets to prioritize pedestrians and cyclists.
Agenda segment, June 18, 2020: The golden age of cycling?
Over the course of a month, a cyclist or pedestrian will spend 40 per cent more than a motorist. Improvements to the public realm that facilitate pedestrian or cyclist access can increase retail sales by as much as 30 per cent. Installing bike-parking infrastructure can yield as much as five times the amount of retail spending per square metre than the same allowed to car parking. Cyclists and pedestrians were also shown to visit the small businesses of their local commercial thoroughfares more frequently than motorists did — frequently twice as often.
The same study revealed that business owners often dramatically overestimated the number of clients who come by car and underestimated the social impact of creating more convivial urban environments. And these kinds of results aren’t limited to London but confirmed what had already been concluded in myriad other cities, including San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, and Copenhagen.
And don’t forget: all those people using their bikes instead of driving their cars means fewer cars looking for parking spots. In the same way bike lanes take cars off the streets, they also take cars out of parking spaces.
Bike lanes improve safety and reduce collisions
Several candidates very publicly oppose bike lanes, but it’s the opposition of former police chief Mark Saunders that arguably makes the least sense. One might assume a public-security official who routinely talks about the need to improve public safety would be more up to speed on the latest studies that demonstrate, unequivocally, that adding protected bike lanes improves safety not only for cyclists, but also for all road users. Saunders wouldn’t have to look very far to find convincing evidence of the beneficial impact of bike lanes: the Toronto Police Service has been collecting data that comes to the same conclusion. Saunders’s proposal to tear up extant bike lanes on Toronto’s University Avenue would result in an inexcusable waste of taxpayers’ money— especially given that the cost of removing them could be better spent building new bike lanes elsewhere — and be a step in the wrong direction in terms of improving roadway safety for everyone.
This generalized lack of awareness of what policies are working elsewhere and what the latest studies and data prove on the matter of urban cycling is worrisome enough in its own right, but it’s particularly frustrating that some mayoral candidates seem to be ignorant of the fact that other Canadian cities are leading where Toronto is falling behind.
Agenda segment, June 20, 2022: How do we make roads safer?
Where John Tory proposed a 100-kilometre extension of bike lanes for Toronto — a plan at least a few mayoral candidates are keen to torpedo — Montreal is moving ahead with a 200-kilometre expansion of its protected express bike-lane network, the REV (in case your high-school French is rusty, the initialism is pronounced rêve, like the French word for dream). But bear in mind, this is a 200-kilometre addition to the city’s existing 900-kilometre bike-path network. The immediate consequence of all this new cycling infrastructure? More Montrealers using their bikes to safely get around the city, fewer accidents, less congestion, and more livable urban neighbourhoods.
It would be a colossal shame for this election to be about who commits to doing the least to improve cycling infrastructure in Toronto, since the positive impacts would be felt far and wide. It’s not only precisely what’s needed to help get the city back on its feet after the pandemic, but also exactly the kind of pragmatic and progressive program any major city needs in the era of climate catastrophe. That any serious candidate can take resolutely anti-bike positions despite mountains of data-driven analysis is concerning. But the true danger is that this ignorance might cast a chill on anyone else’s plans. If any city in Canada could afford some bold visionaries, it’s Toronto.
It’s high time to switch gears — the era of the car is over.
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