Many City Bike Lanes Will Need Provincial Approval
This is a release from the province of Ontario:
The Ontario government is making life easier for drivers by introducing legislation that would, if passed, require municipalities to receive approval from the province before installing new bike lanes that would result in the removal of lanes for traffic. Municipalities would be required to demonstrate that the proposed bike lanes won’t have a negative impact on vehicle traffic.
“Cities in Ontario have seen an explosion of bike lanes, including many that were installed during the pandemic when fewer vehicles were on the road and their impacts on traffic were unclear,” said Prabmeet Sarkaria, Minister of Transportation. “Too many drivers are now stuck in gridlock as a result, which is why our government is bringing informed decision-making and oversight to bike lanes as well as taking steps to increase speed limits safely and clean up potholes.”
These proposed changes are part of upcoming legislation that will kick off the fall sitting of the Ontario legislature on October 21, 2024, with a focus on tackling gridlock and getting drivers and commuters across Ontario out of traffic.
Ontario is also moving forward with plans to make life more convenient for drivers by increasing the speed limit to 110 km/h, where it is safe to do so, on all 400-series highways. This builds on the safe and successful increase of speed limits on more than one-third of provincial 400-series highways to date. The government is also developing a design standard to allow vehicles to travel safely at speeds higher than 120 km/h on new highways.
In addition, to help make Ontario roads safer and prevent accidents and damages that can occur from potholes, the government is consulting with municipalities to develop a potholes prevention and repair fund to open in the 2025 construction season. The program would support smaller municipalities with road maintenance and set standards to help improve road conditions and promote high-quality roadwork across the province.
The government is also proposing to enshrine in the legislation the current freeze on knowledge and road test fees so that any future increases would require a legislative amendment. The freeze on fee increases, which was scheduled to rise roughly 4.5 per cent a year, will help save Ontarians $72 million this decade.
Quick Facts
The proposed legislation would build on the success of the Get It Done Act, 2024, which has kept costs down by freezing fees for driver’s licences and Ontario Photo Cards, automating licence plate renewals, and prohibiting new tolls on provincial highways.
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Great idea with regards to bicycle lanes as long as cyclists don’t take to the sidewalks as an alternative. Bicycles are vehicles, sidewalks are for pedestrians. It’s fair game if a cyclist wants to dismount and walk their bicycles on a sidewalk so as not to endanger pedestrians.
That reads like a restriction on retrofitting a road with a bike lane if it means reducing the lanes available to other vehicle traffic. Look for new roads to all be designed with bike lanes, needed or not, so they will be saved from the effects of this legislation.
Legislating a freeze on fees and requiring a legislative amendment to remove the freeze is ridiculous. They are citing the $72M savings from this over the next decade. Does this mean that the costs of administering the tests will remain the same for the next ten years? Unlikely. Which means either the money to run the tests will be sucked from somewhere else or the level of service will decline possibly leading to increased wait times and/or people getting through the tests that shouldn’t because standards are lowered.
It seems the government has had its own “freeze on knowledge”.
During the last municipal election, mayoral candidate Catherine McKenney stated that one of her priorities would be to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to connect disconnected bike lanes. Disconnected often at very busy roadways. Bike lanes installed on collector roads that left the cyclist at an intersection with an arterial road that did not have a bike lane. Why? City council passed a blanket policy to always install bike lanes as part of traffic calming initiatives. That this added to the inventory of disconnected bike lanes? Not a point to be considered.
It is a sad commentary indeed when it takes the provincial government to add a dash of common sense to temper the virtuous, ideologically driven one size fits all decisions that result in directing cyclists to hazardous settings. That this decision will limit the installation of bike lanes on high volume, high speed arterial roadways, to connect the ever growing inventory of disconnected bike lanes is truly unfortunate.
Think of this as the government policy equivalent of one of Newton’s laws: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Mindless in = mindless out.
In 2023 the Financial Accountability Office reported that the Ford government had a continency fund of $44 BILLION. It noted that this amount could restore funding to health, education and still pay down the deficit by $3 Billion. In the next yearly report it only mentioned those continency funds that were ear marked.
Why? Because by law they cannot reveal the full contingency fund and only could for 2022 because the Auditor General had previously revealed the full amount. This explains Ford’s spending spree including tunnels under highways …as well as putting the cost of road transportation on everyone not just drivers. These give aways are outrageous and a slap in the face of democracy…as is his constant incursion into municipal affairs.