A car stops halfway into the dedicated eastbound bike lane on Bloor St. West near Huron St., in Toronto, on July 9, 2018.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
Sarah Elton is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Eakin Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research Methodology. Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher is a Data Sciences Institute postdoctoral fellow in civil and industrial engineering at the University of Toronto.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford isn’t the only driver in Toronto who considers bike lanes to be a nuisance. It’s easy to feel like they’re your problem when you are sitting behind the wheel, stuck in gridlock. This feeling that cyclists are to blame for Toronto’s citywide gridlock problem has inspired Ontario’s newly passed legislation, the Reducing Gridlock and Saving You Time Act, which mandates the destruction of bike lane infrastructure.
But 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.
Bill 212 offers what appears to be a simple answer to the complicated problem of gridlock, and in doing so, it allows misinformation about bike lanes to justify policy. It ignores the well-documented benefits of safe bike infrastructure that should inform transportation policy. Take, for instance, research conducted at the University of Toronto that finds that bike lanes in the city help people get where they need to go. By studying how many destinations can be reached using only safe cycling infrastructure, the research found that these separated bike lanes motivate people to get on their bikes in Toronto.
For example, for every 100 additional workplaces a person can access using safe bike infrastructure in Toronto, their likelihood of travelling by bike goes up by 40 per cent. This means that the Bloor, Yonge and University Avenue cycle tracks, which have been targeted by the new legislation, are crucial to cycling in Toronto. Without these cycle tracks, more than 600,000 people would have fewer destinations they can reach safely by bike. Also, businesses along both Yonge Street and Bloor Street would lose on average half of the customers who can currently reach them by bike.
These are all data-driven reasons for making sure Canadian cities have safe cycling infrastructure so that more people can choose to ride a bike for their everyday trips, without risking their lives on a road with cars and trucks.
Innumerable studies conducted in cities around the world have found that safe bike infrastructure has many other benefits. For example, people arriving by car spend less money at main street businesses serviced by bike lanes in comparison to people arriving by bike – and cyclists also stop at these businesses more often than drivers do. This has been known for a long time. Ten years ago, a study from New York City’s Department of Transportation evaluated case studies where active transportation infrastructure was added and found higher sales relative to comparison sites. That’s not to mention the individual benefits of improved health supported by safe infrastructure, as well as the money that people save when they replace car trips with cheaper transportation, or the shared benefits of reducing air pollution and helping to meet urban sustainability goals.
The data in support of bike lanes is so conclusive that the provincial government’s own leaked internal report acknowledged that “most research … suggests reducing road capacity by introducing bike lanes can encourage biking and discourage car use, alleviating congestion.”
There is a lot of data to support expanding bike lanes. Yet the provincial government plans to destroy existing infrastructure, regardless of the cost to taxpayers, and prevent new safe cycling infrastructure investments if they take space away from drivers. What we see here is a contest over what informs transportation and infrastructure policy: either that irritated feeling you get when you’re stuck in traffic, or actual data-driven evidence.
Ripping up bike lanes based on frustration is bad policy. Canadians may think that post-truth policy making is a condition more prevalent south of the border, but buckle up: With Doug Ford in the driver’s seat, frustration – not data – is leading the way.