I delight in the little ironies and absurdities of life. In strange times, the ability to laugh at something silly is, in my view, a survival adaptation. And I had myself a giggle when listening to the transportation minister announce that Ontario will now require municipalities to seek approval before installing a bike lane on a lane previously available for car traffic.
Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria, who didn’t cite any real evidence about why this is necessary, has said that all you need to do is look out a window to see that bike lanes are not worth the congestion they create. According to the minister, there are simply not enough cyclists using the bike lanes to offset the number of cars that end up stranded in traffic. And I heard the minister say so, in a clip that was played on a local radio station during its news broadcast. I was indeed looking out a window — the window of my car. I was driving down Yonge Street, returning from a trip to North York to my home in midtown Toronto. And do you know what I saw out my window while driving down this vital artery during rush hour on a weeknight?
I saw on-street parking. Lots of it. Yonge Street is three southbound lanes in the area I was driving, from near Finch Station down toward the 401. And one of those three lanes was taken up entirely by on-street parking. People were parked outside shops, restaurants, businesses, and residential towers. Fully one-third of Yonge Street’s southbound capacity was lost during rush hour because of parking. I have a hunch, though, that we aren’t going to hear much from the Ford government about “fixing” that. The government absolutely would have the authority to do something. It might try to pretend that this is a purely local issue, but so are bike lanes, so the jig is up on that one. But, no. No matter how much Doug Ford talks about fighting congestion, he isn’t going to do a thing about on-street parking.
That’s because the people who get mad about bike lanes are also the people who get mad about losing on-street parking. And those are the people Ford needs votes from.
I appreciate the work some of my colleagues have put into reporting on this file. They’ve cited the studies showing that bike lanes improve congestion, instead of worsening it. They’ve observed the jurisdictional overreach inherent in Ford’s yet again acting like the premier of Toronto. They’ve shared little charts comparing how different transportation modes can maximize (or not) the number of people who can use an available lane of traffic during any given hour of travel. Truly, I appreciate this.
But I’m not going to bother. I’m going to insist on pointing out the blindly obvious: no one in the Ford government cares whether this makes any sense. They will not be swayed by a chart, meme, or study. They have already arrived at the only conclusion that is relevant here: their voters are going to be happy that they are doing this. It will be popular with the base. As a welcome side effect, it will probably result in some of the people who will never vote for them losing their minds and tweeting something stupid and/or overwrought that the government will be able to exploit, again to the benefit of its base.
This is raw 21st-century politics, and Ford is really good at it.
You know, the funny thing is, I drive my car a lot more than I ride my bike — especially when I’m hauling a bunch of hockey equipment, like I was last night. So if you had to put me down on one side of the ledger or another, even though I do ride my bike and use the TTC regularly, I would have to cop to being a driver first. Furthermore, I’m also skeptical of a lot of the studies that insist that what Toronto has been doing in recent years is making congestion better. I gotta say, as a guy who lives here, that just feels kind of wrong to me. I don’t know how much of that should be laid at the feet of bike-lane expansion. I suspect the bigger culprit is the fact that the city, thanks to sustained underspending on basic maintenance, is now finding itself in a position where it has to rip up most of the roadwork all at once and seems to be unable or unwilling to put any tiny bit of effort into coordinating the construction so that not every route from A to B is simultaneously destroyed.
But in any case, yeah, I can buy the fact that removing lanes of traffic to install bike lanes, at least when you’re also tearing up all the other roads, is contributing to congestion. I’m not as dismissive of the point as a lot of people.
I also am not going to fall over myself to pretend that what Ford and Co. are doing is particularly brilliant or principled. It’s political. This is yet another sign that the government wants to hold an election soon, and although it continues to poll in super-majority territory — way ahead of the second-place Liberals — the government seems strangely nervous.
That might actually be the bigger story. I’ve been watching the Ford government for years, and over the past six months or so, I have been baffled by this strange vibe of nervousness. Some of my savvy political friends tell me that Ford is worried his job will get harder if Pierre Poilievre becomes prime minister. Maybe there’s some truth to that, and Ford is trying to shore up his right flank before any possible change in Ottawa. In any case, the point is, a bunch of his recent moves are not just political, but also nervously political. And I find that interesting.
We’ll see whether we get more signs of that. But, in the meantime, what we will get is more of what we’re already getting: entirely political decisions based on laughable evidence, if any, that include healthy dollops of either hypocrisy or wilful blindness. Moves that will make sense only in the context of base-pleasing politics. They will, sadly, make a lot of sense for that.
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