Late last year, about 1,000 cyclists gathered in Toronto to protest against Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s controversial Bill 212, ostensibly meant to address Toronto’s hellish traffic. The legislation allows the provincial Minister of Transportation to expedite construction on major highway and other road infrastructure projects, a move that swims against the currents of prevailing urban policy research showing that highway expansion is counterproductive to solving congestion.

But even more confoundingly, the legislation also greenlights the removal of major downtown Toronto bike lanes on the bustling Yonge, Bloor and University Avenues — and curtails potential bike lanes by forcing the municipal councils to gain approval from the province before any future installations.

Why is the province attacking bike lanes now, after three years of construction? Experts say it’s a clear political move to undermine the city’s urban core rather than a true effort to address the congestion crisis.

“At this moment, it’s being proposed to tap into the prejudices that suburbanites around Toronto, or some that formally live inside the City of Toronto, have about the city,” says Jason Hackworth, a professor of planning and geography at the University of Toronto. “This in turn will help Doug Ford win the election.”

Last month, the province announced that it will delay bike lane removals until March 2025 following a lawsuit by cycling activist group Cycle Toronto. Despite this small victory, the future of Toronto’s bike lanes is still uncertain.

Fact-checking Ford

The legislation is the climax of the conservative premier’s long war on bikes, a war Ford has waged using inaccurate and misleading data.

Ford claimed that he “sees maybe one cyclist ride on Bloor Street every year” as evidence against the separated and raised bike lane, which was recently installed after decades of community-led efforts. Meanwhile, city data points to 694 cyclists riding on the street on an average day in May after the bike lane was finished. And days after Ford’s statement, The Trillium notes, a bike counter reported that 415 cyclists had used the lane that afternoon; 189,587 cyclists had used it since the machine had been installed that summer.

Ford raised concerns over how the reduced lanes will impact travel times for emergency vehicles, ambulances and fire trucks. City data also points to traffic time decreasing by 30 seconds for emergency first aid vehicles after the implementation. Recent research out of the University of Iowa has also shown that 4- to 3- lane conversions have no impact on emergency response times.

Ford has repeatedly claimed that only 1.2% of all commuters in Toronto commute to work by bike. But this statistic is outdated; it was drawn from 2011 census data, before most bike lanes used today were even constructed. In 2019, a poll run by the city found that 70% of Torontonians rode bikes; about 26% identified as “recreational” cyclists, while another 44% said they were “utilitarian cyclists” who rode to work, to class, to shop and more.

Moreover, Ford’s misleading 1.2% statistic draws from a census report that covered not only Toronto but its surrounding suburbs, a region known as the Greater Toronto Area. With sprawling, car-centric suburbs such as Ajax or Burlington diluting the data, the 1.2% statistic is hardly representative of the more than 700,000 people living in the downtown area, formerly designated as “Old Toronto.”

In fact, an analysis of 2021 census data suggests at least 5% of Old Toronto residents primarily commute by bike, a proportion that reaches up to 20% in some parts of the urban core and would be significantly higher if it counted occasional and leisure cyclists.

The suffocation of Toronto

The conflict between “Old Toronto” and its suburbs is at the center of the current bike lane debacle. In 1998, despite two-thirds of the population voting against it, the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario combined six separate municipalities into one megacity and streamlined their distinct city councils into one.

Once an independent left-leaning city, “Old Toronto” became only one part of a city council dominated by its larger Conservative suburbs. The city council has been Conservative-led since 1997, except for a period between 2003-2010. Rather than take into account downtown residents who rely on cycling and public transport, the Conservatives favor their suburban voter base, who generally experience downtown through the windows of a car.

Attempts to update or expand Toronto’s transit connectivity and infrastructure are near-impossible, as such decisions need the approval of suburban commuters. Meanwhile, experts have made clear that such investments are the only effective solution to the congestion plaguing the city.

“Those of us who live in the City of Toronto and work there, not just go to work and play there, we have to live with it,” Hackworth says. “They can reverse things that took us years to fight for such as bike lanes, and they can also misrepresent us. I think this is a political ploy that will not put a dent into the actual problem it is positioned to resolve, but I don’t think that’s why it’s being proposed.”

Under Bill 212, not only will major bike lanes be removed to make way for more car lanes, the province will also be empowered to construct the controversial Highway 413 through the environmentally-protected Greenbelt lands. Although these efforts are framed as “reducing gridlock,” many studies have shown that adding more lanes is counterproductive, in actuality increasing traffic congestion.

Despite Toronto’s many hard-fought advances to modernize and expand its bike infrastructure, this progress is at risk of being undermined by its history of struggle with the province and its suburbs. The fight unfolding in Toronto right now symbolizes the need for all cities to decide their own futures, as the automobiles of the megacity are running over Old Toronto’s remains.

This post was originally published on Next City.