Where is the ‘common sense’ here?

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With nearly half a trillion dollars in debt and vast spending commitments for transit, highways, health and other urgent needs, the government of Ontario cannot afford to waste any money. So why on earth would we want to spend tens of millions to rip out a bunch of bicycle lanes in Toronto?

Under the past few mayors, the city has built a substantial network of lanes so that cyclists can navigate the city in relative safety. It lagged behind other cities in this effort – Montreal took the lead years ago – but it has been catching up. A cyclist can now get around most of the central city in marked and protected lanes, a huge improvement on the days of jockeying shoulder to shoulder with speeding cars.

Cities around the world have been building out their biking networks. London’s has grown fivefold since 2016, reaching 450 kilometres – more than the whole Tube system. An ambitious cycling plan introduced under former mayor Anne Hidalgo has transformed Paris into a pedalling paradise, with a vast bike-share fleet and tens of thousands of bike-rack spaces. New York, Vancouver, San Francisco, Shanghai, Amsterdam – all now have extensive cycling networks.

The result is not just safer and smoother cycling but calmer, healthier and more livable cities. Paris has a whole new feel, with streams of bikes replacing the throngs of belching cars that used to choke the streets. Those streams are as much the symbol of progressive 21st-century cities as hosts of gleaming automobiles were of 20th-century ones.

All of this seems to have sailed right over the head of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative premier, Doug Ford. Since the days he and his brother Rob ruled the roost at Toronto City Hall, he has been fixated on ending the so-called “war on the car.” Putting bike lanes on big Toronto streets such as Bloor, Yonge and University was, to him, part of that grand conspiracy against the long-suffering motorist.

He vowed that they must go, even though it cost the city $27-million to put them in and, according to a city report, would cost nearly double that to pull them out. He went as far as to bring in a law requiring cities to get a green light from Queen’s Park before building a bike lane that takes away a lane of traffic. The province also gave itself the power to rip out the offending lanes on Bloor, Yonge and University. That thwarted the clearly expressed will of Toronto’s city council, which had studied, debated and approved the lanes and was elected to make precisely this sort of local decision.

After an appeal-court ruling on Aug. 14 that said the government was within its rights to remove the lanes, Mr. Ford started revving up the bulldozers. In a social media video released this week, he told viewers that officials were already starting to hire contractors for the removal work. “We’re not wasting any time,” he said. “We’re moving fast.”

His government, he said, “was elected with a clear mandate from the people of Ontario to fight gridlock and get drivers moving again, including by taking bike lanes off our busiest streets and putting them on secondary roads.”

That sounds sensible enough: cars on big roads, bikes on smaller ones. But in fact, no efficient bike system works this way. Most big-city networks put major bike routes on bigger roads to connect to transit hubs and business or entertainment districts. Lanes on smaller streets complete the grid, linking up to major corridors and routing cyclists through quieter neighbourhoods when possible.

Paris has installed lanes on both small streets and major ones. It even put a big cycling corridor on the famous Rue de Rivoli, which runs past the Louvre and once had seven lanes for parking and traffic. New York has good, recently improved bike lanes on Sixth and Seventh Avenues in the heart of Manhattan. One of Vancouver’s busiest goes over the heavily trafficked Burrard Bridge. With good design and engineering, cars and bikes can co-exist on even the biggest roads.

Mr. Ford’s campaign against the bike lanes seems based more on animus against bike-riding pinkos – as Don Cherry described them at the inauguration of Rob Ford as Toronto’s mayor in 2010 – than any foundation of fact. Documents filed in court during the legal battle revealed that his government was shown research that removing the lanes could make collisions more likely and might not even reduce traffic congestion in the end.

But there was the premier this week, standing next to a bike lane and pledging more “common sense infrastructure decisions that will keep people moving.” If spending nearly $50-million to destroy something that already exists is his idea of common sense, we had all better hold onto our wallets.