How car-brained is Doug Ford's Ontario Government?

Deaths on the road are just a cost of doing business, and the business of Ontario apparently is driving.

I was not going to write again about Doug Ford’s plan to rip out the bike lanes that keep me and my family safe; so many people are doing a far better job of it. There are Sarah Elton and Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher in the Globe and Mail:

“This legislative move is not the latest salvo in the so-called “war on the car” (or bike, depending on your perspective). Rather this bill is part of the war on the facts – on evidence and data – that we are witnessing spread across the continent. It’s an example of post-truth politics in Canada.”

There’s Shawn Micallef in The Star talking about the “war on the car:”

“In this rhetorical war, cyclists are often characterized as soft, weak or even “woke,” but there is nothing tougher than a cyclist in Toronto. They ride through heat, cold, rain and, yes, even the handful of days Toronto gets snow. Adults and children ride on fraught streets bereft of safe infrastructure.”

But I changed my mind this morning when I saw the ad “paid for by the Government of Ontario,” which is every citizen, whether they drive or not. If there ever was a war on the car, a term invented by Doug Ford’s late brother Rob, the car and the drivers won and continue winning. Let’s look at some of these gifts to drivers:

• $40 million saved by eliminating the Drive Clean Program. This was a test where cars were tested for emissions and was responsible for getting a lot of smoking junkers off the road. Is anything saved, or are we now paying it in health care costs because of added pollution?

• $600- Average amount saved by scrapping the licence plate sticker fees. Really? How many cars do people own? Stickers were only $120. And to get a sticker, you had to prove you had insurance. People are still supposed to renew online, but how many do? How many more people are now driving uninsured?

• $320- average household savings from gas and fuel tax cuts. Stanley Jevons might point out that some will get eaten up by driving more, creating more emissions.

Then there is the ad headline, “Ontario is helping you keep more of what’s yours.” The only people who get to keep more are drivers, who are increasingly subsidized by those of us who pay taxes but don’t drive.

There are so many other costs that we cover to feed Doug’s car-brain. We have the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, which Doug insisted on burying so that it wouldn’t slow down drivers at intersections or eat up any driving lanes. So it’s years late, billions over budget, and less useful for transit users with fewer stops and more stairs.

Or Highway 413, which will open up the greenbelt for low-density sprawl and yet more cars. And we can’t even imagine how much his ridiculous 55 km car tunnel under the city will cost, which Andrew Clark of the Globe and Mail said “may just be the worst idea in the history of the world.”

And now we have to pay to rip out the bike lanes that encourage cycling and keep us from being killed by drivers, five last year on streets without bike lanes, or by the construction industry, like the young woman who dodged a dumpster dropped in the bike lane and got hit by a dump truck.

Doug’s car-brain is exposed when he is asked about cyclists being killed, and he equates it with thousands of drivers being killed, which is accepted as a cost of doing car business.

“My heart goes out to the families, and I'm so sorry, just like I'm sorry when people get in car accidents and motorcycle accidents and so on and so forth,” Ford said when asked about the six cyclists who have already died on Toronto’s roads this year. “That's terrible. We want to keep everyone safe. I want to keep everyone safe across the roads.”

What’s terrible is the car-brained acceptance that there is a human cost to having cars move fast, but it’s worth paying as long as the cars keep moving. That’s why he also raised speed limits on Provincial highways.

He could be taking our tax dollars and fixing our hospitals instead of closing them, building housing instead of highways for his developer friends, or funding education. There is no point in even mentioning reducing carbon emissions; every decision he makes increases them.

And soon, we will all receive a cheque in the mail, a bribe before the snap election he will probably call in the spring, which Doug will win because most of the province is car-brained.

And I am sure he will be so sorry when the next cyclist is killed.