Doug Ford wants to sell you a bill of goods about bike lanes. The premier, speaking in Cobourg on Monday, laid out his arguments for restricting municipalities’ ability to build them, something the provincial government will bring forward in legislation when its current 136-day shutdown ends next month. The arguments themselves are almost beside the point: bike lanes are anathema to many conservatives, who seem to balk at the implication that maybe, just maybe, not everyone needs to drive to get milk from the grocery store.
Nevertheless, the premier offered some rationalizations for his latest encroachment on municipal autonomy, alleging that bike lanes can simply be moved from arterial roads to “secondary streets.” He stated that, in downtown Toronto, the presence of bike lanes on University Avenue, in particular, has hampered ambulances delivering patients to hospitals.
To take the second point first: Is Ford sure he wants to talk about access to health care? Is he really, really sure? Because it turns out the City of Toronto tracks changes in travel times when it installs bike lanes — including on Yonge Street, where paramedic services have been largely unaffected. According to a report released last year, in fact, “recent increases in response times are primarily attributable to health system challenges, particularly in-hospital wait times for paramedics” (emphasis mine).
Ford presides over a government that promised, when it was elected in 2018, to end hallway health care. Six years later, we’ve seen no real improvement: ambulances are lined up three and four deep outside ERs, while overburdened health-care workers struggle to admit patients in a timely manner. But Ford is choosing to complain about bike lanes instead of fixing the actual problem.
The idea that bike lanes can be rerouted off arterial roads sounds smart only to people who’ve never thought about the topic in depth. There are cases where it can work, but they’re in the minority for a few pretty simple reasons. First, cyclists are — stay with me here — actually trying to get places, and those places are often on major arterial roads. If bike lanes are too far away from cyclists’ destinations, those cyclists will ride in mixed traffic instead. In Toronto, this is exactly what happened on Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue pre-COVID: the route had been a major cyclist thoroughfare for decades before the city deigned to install bike lanes.
Second, particularly once you get into the suburbs, the “secondary roads” that would actually be useful for bike lanes become few and far between. The suburbs were designed from the ground up to divert traffic away from local roads and onto major arterials; what secondary roads do exist are broken up into cul-de-sacs and other forms that make direct travel difficult by design. And that’s assuming, optimistically, that everyone can agree on what a “secondary” road even is. This is, in fact, one of the most common planning disputes in Toronto: city policies and local residents and business owners frequently disagree as to whether a given street is merely a “local road” or something that can accommodate change, be it a bike lane or a new apartment building.
Congestion is a real problem, and it’s fair enough that the provincial government wants to address it. Claiming this can be done by restricting bike lanes is complete nonsense. Ford could turn back time and remove every bike lane in Toronto — it’s within his power to do so — yet if drivers noticed any improvement, it would be fleeting. But then, actually solving the problem doesn’t seem to be the point: those who remember the premier’s tenure on Toronto city council will recall that removing the Jarvis Street bike lane cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, put everyone (including motorists) in greater danger of collisions, and changed travel times barely at all. But it upset the people whom Ford and his allies seemingly wanted to upset, so the laws of logic and fiscal prudence were suspended.
It's particularly galling for Ford to insist that the full force of the Ontario Legislative Assembly be brought to bear against bike lanes at the exact moment his government is abandoning serious efforts to address the housing crisis: the premier has repeatedly stated that he won’t force municipalities to zone for new homes commensurate with the dire need. I suppose this at least provides voters with a useful heuristic: For Ford, it would appear, the mere sight of a cyclist moving efficiently through a city is an abomination that must be suppressed. A generational housing crisis is something to punt on.
Even if none of the above were true, it’s not clear this is a political winner for Ford, at least not in the places he needs it to be. Owing to the vagaries of Toronto and Mississauga politics, we’ve had two special mayoral elections since 2022 in two of the province’s biggest cities. In both cases, candidates tried to make political hay out of bike lanes. In 2023, Mark Saunders received 8.59 per cent of the vote Toronto-wide; in 2024, Dipika Damerla received 19.37 per cent of the vote in Mississauga. Both finished third in their respective races — races in which bike lanes were at least theoretically a more salient issue. Voters in a provincial general election are more likely to ask questions about schools, hospitals, and, yes, housing than about bike lanes. It’s a shame the premier has so few good answers for the real issues facing Ontario that he has to invent fake ones.
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