City of Toronto calculates cost of bike lane removal, blames congestion on construction – Toronto | Globalnews.ca

Removing three Toronto bike lanes the Ford government has in its crosshairs could cost $48 million and result in months of road closures, according to a new report written for city council.

In a report made public on Wednesday, staff estimated the cost of removing bike lanes installed on Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue, the streets from which the province plans to use legislation to remove cycling infrastructure.

The new report outlined the city’s sunk costs, the price tag for removal and how the change could impact commuters in Toronto. It suggested that construction, including delayed provincial transit projects, was the primary driver of congestion, not bike lanes.

“While the economic benefits of these projects will deliver long-term value to the residents and businesses in the city, the impacts of construction are having a direct impact on network capacity and mobility across the city,” the report said.

“Construction has increased, travel patterns and habits have changed, the city population continues to grow rapidly and, as a result, overall congestion is having a significant impact on people’s daily lives and travel.”

In total, removing existing bike lanes on Bloor Street, University Avenue and Yonge Street would cost $48 million, the report said. The city would also lose a total of $27 million that was spent on installing them in the first place.

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The province has promised to pay the cost of removing bike lanes — although it has not committed to covering soft costs like staff planning time or money lost installing the infrastructure.

Staff said in the report that it was unclear how much it would cost to redesign and re-plan the vehicle lanes for those roads or how much it would cost to rebuild the bike lanes on side streets, as the province has suggested.

The city — where Mayor Olivia Chow has vehemently opposed plans to remove bike lanes — said the act of removing them would, in itself, create traffic problems.

“Increased travel times for drivers due to traffic congestion from additional construction that would be necessary to facilitate the removal of existing bike lanes,” the report said.

“Restoring vehicle lanes on Bloor Street, University Avenue and Yonge Street would take additional staff resources and time to redesign and reconstruct these roads, and would negatively impact driver travel time and businesses during construction, with likely minimal improvements in travel time once lanes are removed.”

Toronto’s bike lanes have been in the spotlight for weeks after the provincial government unveiled plans to make it harder for cities to build new bike lanes, review infrastructure installed in the past five years and rip out the three Toronto routes.

The provincial government is in the process of fast-tracking the legislation required to remove bike lanes from Toronto’s streets and slow their installation in other places. Debate on the bill was curtailed and it is set to receive a shorter-than-usual committee hearing.

A spokesperson for Minister of Transportation Prabmeet Sarkaria said Toronto’s traffic plans had failed.

“It’s clear that the city’s approach isn’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,” they said in a statement.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford told Global News in October that he planned to remove the three sets of bike lanes from Toronto’s streets, regardless of what studies and data showed.

Asked whether the government wanted certain criteria to be met before the removal of those lanes, Ford said: “No.” He added, “They’re coming out,” during a brief interview at Queen’s Park.

The Ontario NDP has called the bike lane removal plan a political “distraction” from the government.

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