Do cycling corridors really slow traffic? We fact-checked the bike lane blame game

Ford’s frustration at slow traffic on Bloor, from the west edge of old Toronto into his power base Etobicoke, has broadened in recent weeks into a much bigger fight over cycling infrastructure across Ontario.

“We need to, and will, remove and replace existing bike lanes on primary roads that are bringing traffic in our cities to an absolute standstill,” Ford recently said, escalating plans to give Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria veto power over any new bike lanes that replace vehicle traffic.

There have been many that have cheered on Ford’s actions. But at the heart of the public debate is an unanswered question: Will cancelling future lanes and reversing city hall’s pandemic wave of installations, which aimed to make cycling safer and combat climate change, reduce Toronto’s infamous congestion?

In a recent morning rush hour, the Star drove Bloor from Runnymede to Resurrection, at the speed limit and slowed only by the many stop lights, especially in The Kingsway.

The 4.7 kilometres took a breezy 13 minutes. Driving the same route eastbound, however, was a painful crawl of more than 24 minutes.

City data, while incomplete and often complicated by the pandemic that dramatically reduced travel times, suggests that installing bike lanes has slowed vehicle traffic on busy streets — but often by a minute or less.

The data suggests there is a problem with Bloor West, that vehicle travel times with bike lanes there have increased more than along other routes.

The Star also drove The Danforth east from Broadview to Dawes, where the bike lane configuration is much like that of Bloor. Gliding 5.4 kilometres through morning rush hour took 14 minutes.

Driving the route west toward downtown was slower but steady at 17 minutes and 19 seconds, with a minor delay due to Ontario Line construction.

Cycleways range from park pathways to painted road lines to corridors separated by barriers. The province has singled out installations that trigger a vehicle lane removal — usually separated lanes — but is arguing no bike lanes should be on major streets.

While a small percentage of Torontonians cycle to work every day, city statistics say that installing bike lanes on nine routes between 2014 and 2021 boosted the number of riders by an average of 200 per cent. Increases ranged from a 25 per cent boost on Bloor West between Shaw and Runnymede, to a 1,095 per cent increase on Adelaide and Richmond.

Amid fierce debate between cyclists and motorists over who owns the road, and between municipal and provincial officials over who should decide how the road is built, we took a look at the arguments in a bid to extract facts from the friction.

We thought answering this question would be easy — just a matter of tracking down the data. We were wrong. 

The good news is that the city often does studies of traffic impacts when installing bike lanes. The bad news is that a lot of these studies aren’t particularly helpful for providing a single definitive answer, especially for the most high-profile lanes.

Take University Avenue. A study by city staff found that vehicle travel times during morning rush hour actually dropped by more than a minute after temporary bike lanes were installed in mid-2020. But the “before” period was measured in fall 2019, while Torontonians were blissfully going about their busy, pre-pandemic lives, whereas the “after” period was the months leading up to October 2020, as COVID’s second wave was surging. If traffic sped up, the coronavirus probably deserves credit. The city has also said current traffic jams on University are more likely to be caused by multiple ongoing construction projects, including Metrolinx’s Ontario Line. 

Other traffic studies are also complicated by the pandemic, when the city accelerated its cycling network expansion to keep residents active outdoors. That makes it hard to disentangle the effects of bike lanes on traffic from the effects of pandemic recovery, not to mention construction, seasonal shifts and speed limit reductions (more on that later).

An extension of bike lanes on Bloor West that stretches into Etobicoke — Ford’s voter base — posts some of the worst car-commuter consequences. On one eastbound stretch during evening rush hour, vehicle travel times jumped by an average of 4.4 minutes, for what was previously an 8.2-minute drive.

But the “before” period, from fall 2022 into the next spring, compared to the “after” period, one year later, spans a time when return-to-work mandates ratcheted up significantly. The percentage of Toronto employees who returned to their offices jumped from 40 per cent in the “before” period to about 60 per cent in the “after” period, according to the Strategic Regional Research Alliance’s occupancy index.

The Bloor West bike lanes bad rap might lessen soon. The city says it’s adjusting signal timing along that stretch this fall, and evidence suggests this will make a noticeable difference. On the Yonge Street lanes in midtown, also a pandemic pilot, vehicle travel times initially jumped by 2.5 minutes on weekdays midday. After signal adjustments, that dropped to 69 seconds; increases to morning and evening rush hour times are now just 20 and 50 seconds, respectively. 

One traffic analysis uncomplicated by the pandemic was done for some of Toronto’s most popular bike lanes: Richmond and Adelaide. Cyclist volumes increased by more than 1,000 per cent in 2016 on some stretches compared to 2013, before lanes were installed. But vehicle travel times didn’t change much: one street increased by about a minute and a half, and another decreased by about a minute and a quarter.

The study also suggests that nearly all — 94 per cent — of these riders were likely to be new cyclists shifting from car, foot or transit, rather than existing bike commuters pulled from other routes.

Critics of cycling often point to low cycling rates overall to say building lanes isn’t worthwhile: in 2011, the last year Statistics Canada collected this information, only 1.2 per cent of Torontonians commuted to work by bicycle. Cycling advocates point to Richmond and Adelaide with the opposite message: if you build it, they will come. 

Critics of bike lanes argue that they hinder the movement of emergency service vehicles and therefore put lives in danger.

Social-media videos of manoeuvring ambulances are displayed as evidence. “When an ambulance cannot rush a sick person to hospital, when a fire truck sits waiting for traffic to clear while a home burns, when police cannot respond rapidly to a crime, the safety of everyone is compromised,” warns Keep Toronto Moving, a group lobbying to remove bike lanes from major Toronto streets.

Ford has claimed that due to bike lanes, first responders are “pulling their hair out” over delays that are “an absolute disaster, it’s a nightmare.”

Toronto’s emergency services have for years, however, countered such concerns by saying that bike lanes do not present a problem for front-line responders. Police, fire and paramedic officials have all assured city officials that bike lanes do not hinder their effectiveness.

So what does the data say? The city has studied whether installing bike lanes impeded emergency responders in at least two places: on Yonge Street in midtown, where bike lanes were installed as a pilot project, and on Bloor West. 

A city report found that fire vehicle travel times to sites within the Yonge Street pilot area, in the first 10 months of 2022, increased by eight seconds more than the citywide increase. However, the pilot area did better than the citywide average for an indicator called “total response time” — elapsed time between when the emergency call came and the time the first truck/crew arrived at the emergency scene.

Increases in paramedic response times on that stretch of Yonge, compared to pre-pandemic times, were 36 seconds less than the average citywide increase in response times. Paul Raftis, then-head of Toronto’s paramedic service, told city council in 2022 there was “no evidence of emergency response impacts as a result of the midtown installation.”

A fire service official similarly assured council there was “no degradation of response time in this area.”

The fire service says its response times on that stretch of Bloor improved by 13 seconds, while the citywide average worsened by two seconds.

Jim Jessop, the city’s deputy fire chief, told a recent community meeting about the Bloor extension: “I just pulled the latest data and what our two key performance indicators … show is that, for your ward, your (firefighter) response times are improving.” 

A truth lost so far in this provincial-municipal tussle: the city actually wants to slow cars.

It does not want gridlock, and recently released a new strategy for easing car congestion. But the city does want vehicles to go slower, as part of Vision Zero, a plan to reduce traffic-related deaths and injuries.

“Road safety improvements,” including lowering the speed limit, are also part of what has increased vehicle travel times on the section of Bloor West in Etobicoke, the latest report on the project says. The speed limit was dropped to 40 km/h from 50 km/h, and actual measured car speeds have dutifully dropped as well, by an average of about 17 per cent in both directions.

Narrower vehicle lanes also make cars slow down, research shows, while wider lanes encourage speeding.

This is particularly relevant on streets such as Avenue Road, which have seen a rash of traffic accidents. The city recorded 977 collisions on Avenue between Bloor and Davenport over the past 10 years, including three deaths — all of which were cyclists. City council approved dropping the speed limit to 40 km/h here, too, and intends for the installation of bike lanes in both directions — and the narrowing of car lane widths — to make the street safer for everyone. This still-fresh project also dropped a car lane in each direction; data is being collected on impacts, staff say.

That notion was long ago rejected by Toronto civic leaders, along with those of many major North American and European cities that embraced the idea that cycling is traffic of equal status to vehicles, with bonus societal health and environmental benefits.

Is it possible to keep building a cycling network that doesn’t touch main streets? Yes. Will some cyclists risk riding on main streets without protection from vehicle drivers? Yes. Would removing bike lanes from major streets deter some commuters from riding? Also yes.

Matti Siemiatycki, a U of T expert on city infrastructure, says Toronto streets are a “broken grid” where main streets often do not have parallel side streets on which to build bike lanes. Instead of a straight line getting cyclists quickly from A to B, the route would be up, down and around.

There are areas outside Toronto’s core, such as the Don River trail and bike lanes along the Crosstown LRT route, where off-road rides to work or other destinations makes sense, Siemiatycki said. But bike lanes must be on main streets to safely accommodate the many cyclists who work on a downtown main street or near one, he said.

“Eventually people are going to need to be on those streets and if (bike lanes) are too inconvenient or too circuitous, they’re just not going to be used.”

Dave Shellnutt, a lawyer and cycling advocate, objects to the logic underpinning the “not on main roads” argument. “We need to challenge the primacy we give to the automobile,” he said. “Our best roads and routes should be shared amongst community members, not prioritized to those that have the money to buy and operate single occupancy vehicles.”

The Star asked Trevor Townsend of Keep Toronto Moving, a group that has called for removal of bike lanes on main streets including Bloor, for the side-street alternative route to Bloor from Runnymede to Resurrection.

“Cyclists who don’t feel safe travelling on Bloor Street West are quite capable of mapping alternative routes depending on their destination,” said Townshend, declining to offer a route.

“Busy arterial roads shouldn’t be broken up with separate dedicated bike lanes, it isn’t practical for such a small subset of commuters.”

Ontario’s transportation minister launched the current debate by announcing that municipalities will, under pending legislation, require provincial approval to install any bike lane that necessitates removal of a vehicle lane.

If the province stops there, the big unfolding argument will be over a small percentage of Toronto’s total bike network.

Last year the city installed 19.6 kilometres of new bikeways and upgraded another 16.8 kilometres of existing bike lanes. Only 3.65 kilometres — Bloor West from Runnymede Road to Aberfoyle Crescent — triggered the removal of a full vehicle lane.

By the end of this year, the city will have added bike lanes that necessitated lane removals to major streets, including Bloor West to Resurrection Road, Eglinton Avenue West from Avenue Road to Chaplin Crescent and Broadview Avenue from Cosburn Avenue to O’Connor Drive. However, the city also removed a total of 4.3 kilometres of lanes.

Ford has since talked about forcing Toronto to remove existing bike lanes. If his government follows through and takes issue with bikeways on Yonge Street, Bloor Street, Eglinton Avenue and University Avenue, the loss would be a fraction of the 230 kilometres currently on major corridors, but cyclists would lose significant connectivity that lets them commute safely.