Removing bike lanes on major Toronto streets would cost at least $48 million: city staff

A cyclist uses a bike lane in Toronto on Monday, Oct. 21, 2024.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

Removing bike lanes on sections of Bloor Street, Yonge Street, and University Avenue could cost taxpayers at least $48 million.

That is according to a city staff report looking into the impact of the Ontario government’s proposed Bill 212 tabled last month, which would require municipalities to ask the province for permission to install bike lanes when they remove a lane of vehicle traffic.

The province later added a new regulation that would see sections of bike lanes on those three major Toronto roads to be ripped out.

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“This estimate includes the cost of road reconstruction for sections of the streets that were recently reconstructed and would need to be rebuilt, and road resurfacing that would be required for other sections,” staff wrote in the report posted on Wednesday.

The price tag, staff said, does not include potential costs associated with changing or cancelling existing construction or maintenance contracts that may be impacted by the plan.

They also noted in the report that as the legislation was just recently announced, the estimates are “at a preliminary order-of-magnitude level” and more details would be needed before they can come up with the true cost.

Two motions about the bike lane removal plan will be discussed at this week’s city council meeting.

In her motion, the mayor pointed out that Bill 212, if passed, would undo city council’s decisions and work, at a “tremendous cost to the taxpayer.” “As Mayor, it is my responsibility to stand up for the decision-making authority of City Council and the expertise of our professional public service which supports that decision-making,” Chow wrote in her motion.

Meanwhile, Coun. Dianne Saxe’s motion directs the city manager to write to Premier Doug Ford and all Ontario municipalities that the city protests the overreach of Bill 212 and asks the province to respect its jurisdiction.

“The City of Toronto owns, pays for, maintains and operates most of the infrastructure that allows this goose to lay its golden eggs in an environment of overwhelming and competing demands. Managing and allocating this public infrastructure so as to appropriately balance these competing demands is a central function of municipal government and essential to allow us to do the jobs we were elected to do,” Saxe wrote in her motion.

“Bill 212 is yet another overreaching attack on the people of Toronto, proposing to wastefully tear up millions of dollars of newly constructed roads in order to distort how Toronto Council balances competing demands for street space, climate action, affordability, road safety, tree cover and quality of life.”

According to staff, the city has already invested $27 million in designing and constructing the three bike lanes.

City staff also looked into the plan’s impact on mobility and safety. On the bike lanes on Bloor Street, between Avenue Road and Shaw Street, the average number of collisions involving cyclists dropped after they were installed.

Data also shows that pedestrian injury collisions and motorists’ injuries in the area decreased, staff said.

Premier Ford has complained about some bike lanes creating gridlock, but city staff noted in their report that restoring lanes would have a negative impact on travel as redesigning and reconstructing vehicle lanes would take time.

The bike lanes on Bloor Street between Spadina Avenue and Avenue Road, which were just reconstructed within the past two years, would require another full road reconstruction project.

“Following at least a year of design and tendering, another reconstruction of the section of Bloor Street between Spadina Avenue and Avenue Road would involve approximately four months with one vehicle lane in each direction, four months of only one vehicle lane in one direction, and four weeks for full intersection closure at St. George Street, with the entirety of work on Bloor Street likely to carry over multiple construction seasons,” staff found.

They noted there would be minimal improvements in travel time without bike lanes.

In a statement to CTV News Toronto, a spokesperson for Ontario’s minister of transportation claimed the city is losing more than $11 billion every year to gridlock and congestion.

“As we’ve said many times- one per cent of people shouldn’t be making decisions for the majority of people who travel on our busiest roads and sit in gridlock every day,” Dakota Brasier said.

“Bike lanes should only go where they make sense.”

She added that the city’s approach wasn’t working and “we encourage them to listen to the thousands of common-sense drivers to help clear our major roads and get people out of traffic.”

With files from CTV News Toronto’s Natalie Johnson