Doug Ford will have blood on his hands if he rips out Toronto bike lanes

The Minister of Transportation takes a "a leap of faith that I’ll be able to get to the office on time." I take a leap of faith about whether my family will get to work alive.

I have been to too many of these on Bloor Street or Avenue Road. Photo Emma Alter

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is not only making it more difficult to install bike lanes in Ontario, but he plans to rip out existing ones on Toronto’s Bloor, Yonge, and University Avenue.

Jarvis Street bike lane, 2012

We have seen this movie before; when Doug’s brother Rob was Mayor of Toronto, they complained that the painted bike lanes on Jarvis Street were wrecking family dinners in Leaside by delaying people two minutes.

Hundreds of us showed up to protest, to no avail; Jarvis Street was reconstructed the way it was before, with a stupid reversing lane in the middle that causes all kinds of crashes, at a cost of close to a million bucks.

January 2024: so much congestion on Bloor Street, thanks to those bike lanes!

Now it is deja vu all over again, with Doug running the province now, and complaining about how congestion on the roads is slowing the drive to the office. I wasn’t going to write about it, given that others have done such a good job of it. Take Taras Grescoe:

Toronto should be—and easily can be—one of the world's great bicycle metropolises. If really top-notch bike infrastructure were combined with the transit the Toronto area deserves, everybody—drivers, cyclists, straphangers, pedestrians—would be happier. They'd get where they're going more comfortably, and the city would be a more attractive place. The problem is the would-be bicycle-and-transit metropolis is surrounded by the self-styled "Ford Nation." As long as the Ford Dynasty is calling the shots, nothing is going to change. No, scratch that: things are definitely going to get worse. As in, more Torontians are going to die, killed by the drivers of cars and trucks.

And Doug and his gang will have blood on their hands.

Yes, blood. These bike lanes exist to make it safe to ride, and encourage people to get out and do it, all year round. But what got me wound up was the the Minister of Transportation writing in the Toronto Star:

To get to work as Ontario’s minister of transportation, I join hundreds of thousands of drivers on the roads of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area every day. I leave my house in Brampton, say goodbye to my wife and daughters and take a leap of faith that I’ll be able to get to the office on time.

Gee, a leap of faith about getting to the office on time. Every morning at six I hear the garage door open as my daughter gets on her bike to ride to work in the dark 10 km on the Bloor bike lane. I worry and take a leap of faith that she will get there alive. The minister’s worries seem picayune by comparison.

Bloor Street has already claimed a few victims; there were already painted bike lanes when Dalia Chako got killed by a truck driver there. It’s why we need proper separated infrastructure.

Doug Ford would roll all this back. He would tear out the bike lanes and make it almost impossible to build more. All so a few people in gasoline powered three ton boxes can cruise a little more quickly for the few hours a day that the streets aren’t filled with parked cars.

I could go on about the importance of bikes and transit in the fight against climate change, and what causes really serious congestion. But I won’t; I am still thinking of my daughter at six in the morning on Bloor Street.

Yet another ghost bike installation on Avenue Road.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this, Jon Lorinc did a brilliant take in Spacing.

Somewhere in this city, there’s a cyclist going about their business who will die in a terrible accident — perhaps sooner, perhaps later — because Doug Ford thinks his campaign to remove bike lanes will make for an excellent wedge issue in the forthcoming provincial election.

That individual has a family and friends, perhaps a pet, interests, quite possibly a job they can reach on two wheels. They might have bought a cargo bike recently, or are trying out an electric model. Maybe they’re using bikeshare because their apartment has no parking spaces. Whatever the constellation of personal details, that person isout there; they just don’t know that they’re doomed. Maybe it’s your best friend. Maybe it’s your child.

Maybe it’s you.