Why Toronto's Yonge Street bike lane is part of a worldwide transportation revolution

This isn't just about convenience, it is about climate.

People have their pitchforks out and are marching down Yonge Street once again, but this time it is the establishment that is on the move to City Hall, protesting the bike lanes that were installed as a pilot project in 2021 through a fancy part of Toronto. They claim that the bike lanes have caused significant congestion and have hurt local businesses. City data show that the pilot is a big success; according to Yonge4All, “More people are walking (up over 140%) and biking (up as much as 162%). In addition, the corridor has more streetside cafes (21), an indication that CafeTO is both popular and profitable. Furthermore, we are hearing that people find Yonge to be safer, quieter and the traffic calmer.”

The pitchfork people complain that they rely exclusively on Yonge Street for access, but so do people on bikes. The two parallel streets are fast-moving multilane urban highways that terrify people on bikes, and the hill is much steeper. Before the Yonge Street bike lanes were installed, the escarpment across midtown Toronto was a real obstacle to getting people on bikes because of the difficulty and the fear.

And getting people on bikes is what we have to do to deal with a growing population, a climate crisis, and an increasingly fragile public transit system. We are also on the cusp of an e-bike and micromobility revolution that will dramatically change the transportation scene in Toronto; the city is built on a tilt, running down to the lake, and combined with the escarpment, it was a hard commute home at the end of a long day. E-bikes flatten the city, and they have a critical role to play in dealing with the climate crisis.

A British study published in 2022, E-bikes and their capability to reduce car CO₂ emissions found that e-bikes do exactly that. The authors figured out what proportion of the population would be comfortable and capable of riding e-bikes while carrying 15 kilograms of stuff or a small child, with safe and protected infrastructure. They found that people will ride further on an e-bike, so the carbon reduction was greatest for suburban users, who have further to go. The CO2 saved (24 million tonnes per year) may not be relevant to Canada, but the principle is: getting people out of cars and onto bikes and e-bikes is the fastest way to drive down carbon emissions. And don’t think electric cars will save us:

 "Although the CO2 intensity of the car fleet will improve as it moves towards electrification, this is progressing too slowly to avoid the need for parallel reductions in car use and the simulation is an attempt to quantify the scale of carbon reductions if a switch to e-bikes were to happen in the near-term. Mass uptake of e-bikes could make a significant early contribution to transport carbon reduction."

The future of transportation is electric, but it isn’t just cars; it’s a mix of electric bikes, scooters, e-cargo bikes, and other forms of micromobility. They all need a safe place to travel. While local residents who drive cars are fuming over a few seconds of delay, the Yonge Street bike lanes provide the only safe north-south link for cyclists for kilometers in either direction. This is not a local issue but affects people all over the city.

Perhaps we shouldn’t call it a Yonge Street bike lane; think of it as the Yonge Street micromobility lane. This is where the world is going, whether the pitchfork people like it or not.