Toronto bike lanes in jeopardy
In response to new legislation, the City of Toronto is adapting and sometimes axing bike lane projects. And it’s not just Toronto – Halifax and Calgary seem to be facing similar challenges.
When the City of Toronto released its 2026 budget, 30 percent of bike lane projects in Toronto’s 2025-2027 plan had been amended, paused or deferred indefinitely. This wasn’t in response to budgetary constraints but new legislation: Bill 212 (passed in 2024) and Bill 60 (passed in 2025). Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher, a Data Sciences Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto who studies safe cycling networks, told Christian Courier that the City of Toronto’s cycling plans are “well-studied and well-planned projects that staff are confident can be delivered on that timeframe. Or at least, they were confident until last year, when it became illegal to build many of them!”
The ripple effects of the new legislation reach beyond Toronto: “Doug Ford’s personal vendetta against a handful of bike lanes in Toronto has now mucked up infrastructure planning across the entire province. There are infrastructure projects in Ottawa, Mississauga, Hamilton, etc., that are collateral damage. We are also seeing ‘bikelash’ in other provinces: Alberta is proposing similar legislation to undo or block cycling infrastructure, for example.”
Patchwork network
“What concerns me most is that the deferred and cancelled projects create glaring missing links in the cycling network and jeopardize the plan’s overall usefulness,” says Bonsma-Fisher.
With the change in plans, three kilometres of road between the Danforth cycle track and Kingston Road will not have a bike lane and will be unsafe for cyclists. This is just one example of patchwork infrastructure, which can lead to more injuries and deaths.
“In our research, we find that people are more likely to cycle when they can get where they need to go using safe infrastructure, so many people will look at the state of the network, see that a link they need is missing, and just not bike. This could lead to a vicious cycle of cycling infrastructure being less-than-optimal, people choosing not to cycle, the infrastructure being perceived as not well-used, and a lack of political support for cycling infrastructure going forward.”
It isn’t just an Ontario problem. Last summer, Nova Scotia’s premier, Tim Houston, threatened to invoke Bill 24 (which had only been passed a few months earlier) to overrule Halifax’s city council if they built a bike lane on Morris Street. The council had already voted the plan through, but dropped it. The Alberta government is pressuring Calgary to move towards reducing bike lanes as well.
“If I had a message for readers, it would be to ask themselves whether their leaders are making evidence-based policy, or policy-based evidence. Do they support something because the evidence shows it’s a good idea, or are they ignoring evidence to push their agenda?”
What the data shows
Bill 60 (“Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act”) was passed in November 2025. The bill doesn’t allow bike lanes to be built anywhere in Ontario if it means reducing a lane of traffic.
“Bill 60 has really thrown a wrench in the works, and there are many cascading impacts of delaying or deferring cycling infrastructure projects [in Toronto],” says Bonsma-Fisher. “First, there is cost and delay from the extra staff time required to redesign projects that are now illegal to build. Second, the cycling team is often able to save money by ‘bundling’ projects with road work that is already happening for other reasons, like a watermain replacement or scheduled repaving. The 2025-2027 near-term plan already tries to optimize for this type of roadwork as much as possible. If the road work must go ahead anyway but the bike lane project is now illegal, that represents a huge missed opportunity to implement cycling infrastructure efficiently – that same project will use a much bigger chunk of Toronto’s cycling budget if it must be implemented as a standalone measure.”
Bill 60 is justified by the provincial government on the claim that bike lanes add congestion to roads. But Bonsma-Fisher says “all the data, research and surveys show the opposite: that bike lanes ultimately reduce congestion by giving people an alternative to driving.”
In Toronto, data sometimes shows an increase in vehicle travel time after a new bike lane is installed but after a year, traffic is back to normal. “Data in Toronto has shown that buses actually got faster after bike lanes were installed, with no slowdown for emergency vehicles or other car traffic.” Long-term research from elsewhere in the world shows that investing in cycling infrastructure means fewer cars on the road, which creates less congestion instead of more. Last year, a peer-reviewed study analyzed data from thousands of cities in 121 countries and found that for every additional kilometre of bike infrastructure, there’s an associated 13,400 additional kilometres travelled by bike per year.
Then there’s the data that shows that slower driving (which is often a goal of building cycling infrastructure) benefits all road users: “The ultimate goal is increased road safety, and cycle tracks do their job amazingly well. A study on Bloor Street in Toronto found that after cycle tracks were installed, the number of ‘near-misses’ for all road users, not just cyclists, went down by 44 percent. The number of conflicts between drivers alone went down by 71 percent!”
Removal of bike lanes
Last July, advocacy group Cycle Toronto and two cyclists challenged the province of Ontario’s plan to remove three key bike lanes on Yonge, University and Bloor. In his statement granting an injunction to block the bike lane removal, Ontario Superior Court Justice Paul Schabas said, “The evidence is clear that restoring a lane of motor vehicle traffic, where it will involve the removal of the protected, or separated, nature of the target bike lanes, will create greater risk to cyclists and to other users of the roads.”
“Cycle Toronto’s charter challenge was extremely popular in Toronto,” says Bonsma-Fisher. “New infrastructure can often be controversial, but once people get used to the infrastructure that’s already built, taking it away becomes personal, especially when it’s you, or your spouse, or your kids who use that infrastructure to get around.”
Cycle Toronto’s challenge of Bill 212 sparked “some very well-attended protest rides in Toronto.” “People submitted a whopping 19,000 comments to the Bill 212 public consultation. I submitted a comment and spoke at the committee of the Ontario Legislature for Bill 212, and every single other presenter at that committee was also opposed to the legislation.”
The provincial government appealed the Ontario Superior Court’s decision, and is currently in court.
