The frothing hatred many people have for bike lanes comes with an untrue assumption; whaters say bike lanes increase traffic for cars, without a shred of evidence. To them, seeing any unused space on the road that doesn’t have a car on it is all the proof they need. If there was no bike lane there, they could drive there! But there is, so they can’t!

On this level, it seems like anybody who can’t manage to wrap their head around this simple concept must be either a very stupid person or an ideologue, a guerilla fighting against cars in the War on Cars because they hate the freedom and innovation cars represent, or something like that.

If you’ve spent any time in these conversations you’ve heard things like this. I’m sympathetic to it! To the naked eye this is really how it all appears. To get a sense of why this isn’t how it really works, let’s consider it from a different angle.

In Toronto, somewhere between 25-30% of the city itself is devoted to car lanes and car parking. Between one quarter and one third of the city, roughly. Let’s imagine there were no bike lanes, or even that bikes didn’t exist.

The city is finite, physically speaking. It cannot grow because you cannot add more land within the same boundaries. Any additional roadways you add necessarily takes away from some other land use, whether it be residential homes, commercial properties, a park, sidewalks…whatever.

If you keep adding more and more cars within the same finite space, traffic will only get worse and worse as a result. That is the root cause of traffic: more cars.

If your task is to relieve congestion and get more people moving more efficiently, quicker, and more reliably, the last thing you’d do is any action that added private cars to the mix. Nothing is more efficient and effective than public transit. On the average work day, the TTC moves 2.5 million+ people. There are 2 million car trips a day in Toronto by commuters, as of May 2023.  

If roads seem congested now, imagine how much worse they’d be without public transit. You cannot understand this topic by looking at the problem through your windshield. You need to pull back and realize the only way to “solve” traffic is by reducing the number of cars on the road, since that what traffic is. Making other modes of transportation more attractive accomplishes that.

It seems a little paradoxical! Fixing traffic by ditching your car eliminates the benefits of fixing the traffic, since you aren’t there to benefit. So drivers hear this and assume it’s communist gobbledygook designed for some ulterior, nefarious motive. When people like me say “we need fewer drivers on our roads,” many people hear “you must stop driving.”

Let’s be clear: even the most adamant bike lane proponents understand that there will always be cars on the road and nobody is trying to remove them all. The point is to reduce reliance on cars, so people who don’t want to drive can stop driving.

You can gauge our city’s devotion to serving the private automobile by how we bend over backwards again and again, sacrificing nearly unlimited physical space and unlimited money to build roads, street, avenues, and highways for cars. If building more roads reduced traffic, Toronto wouldn’t have any traffic!

At some point, cities run out of more space for private cars because a city needs other things in it. I’ve joked in a tongue in cheek way about “fixing” traffic by razing hospitals, schools, homes, sidewalks, parks, and businesses and replacing them with roads. But actually, this is historically pretty much what we’ve done!

Entire communities were eliminated to make way for highways and onramps. Some 50s politicians were militantly opposed to sidewalks in the city, specifically because they took space away from cars to drive. This kind of blind, devouring entitlement is related to the blind spot many drivers have today, where they blame traffic woes on a streetcar carrying dozens of people, but one lone driver holding up a busy streetcar because they’re turning left is never responsible for any delays.

So what we have is an endless tussle between cars and everything else. Drivers expect infinite space and infinite money in a world that is physically and financially finite. Where will it end?

In a world where politicians spend billions to allegedly shorten a driver’s commute by 30 seconds, drivers are accustomed to this whole conversation revolving around them, so much so that they are very confident that the data from scholars and engineers is on their side.

It isn’t! Not even close!

Study after study in multiple cities across North America and elsewhere show that business improves after bike lanes are installed. Crucially, they also show that local business owners routinely overestimate how many of their customers arrive by private car and underestimate the percentage arriving by transit, bike, or foot.

In Toronto, the Bloor-Annex BIA representing 250+ local businesses is fighting to keep the bike lanes installed under John Tory, a conservative insider who is anything but a crazed bike lane guy. Doug Ford swooped in unbidden with $40 million to remove the bike lanes, which were only installed after years of studies and consultations. He’s openly defying local residents and local businesses without invoking one shred of evidence. For the Ontario premier to override the municipality and force his personal whims on the entire city is anti-democratic. For him to do it without any evidence is sheer stupidity.

If I’m wrong, please show me the data! I’ve read a few books on this lately that delved deeper into these types of questions. Killed By a Traffic Engineer; Urban Mobility: How the iPhone, Covid, and Climate Changed Everything; Shrink the City. They were great, especially the first one.

None of these books found any study claiming what Doug Ford and millions of people in Toronto assume to be true, namely that bike lanes increase traffic.

Following the data leads to the exact opposite conclusion they’ve reached: bike lanes help local businesses. Taking this logic to its natural conclusion, excess road space for cars is an attack on local business. The anti-bike lane people identify as pro-business, so hearing this point makes them go nuts. They want comfort and the intellectual high ground.

The reason congestion seems so intractable is that selling vehicles is a pillar of our economy, and it’s impossible for masses of people to both buy enough vehicles to keep the economy rolling without having to encounter each other while driving them. More cars is more traffic. The number of cars you need to sell to boost the economy is the root cause of traffic jams, not bike lanes. Put another way, our economy and our lifestyles are at odds with each other.

Think about it this way: If you think bikes clog streets, imagine how much worse they’d be if bikes were physically the size of cars or trucks! How could opposing what’s small, nimble, and effective fix congestion? To get a sense of how vehicles’ physical size and cumbersome nature is the root cause of traffic, imagine if pedestrians had to line up behind each other if one person walking in front of them was making a left turn, or even a right turn. Cars are uniquely prone to stopping and starting and creating bottlenecks.

Drivers have this idea that there’d be no traffic if only everything was optimal. If the traffic lights were set properly, if every driver drove and parked perfectly, if construction wasn’t excessive, then there’d be no traffic. There’s only traffic because some people are idiots or the city screws everything up!

Let’s be clear: it’s physically impossible for millions of cars to all drive quickly on the same roadways at the same time without crashing into each other. That’s what people expect their drive to be, and they are shocked, shocked when they never ever encounter these impossible optimal conditions. There would have been no traffic except for ___, and the ___ is never all the other cars. This blint spot is captured in the common urban planning refrain, “you’re not in traffic, you are traffic.”

“Induced demand” is the bedrock of urban planning because the phenomenon has been proven real over and over again. Basically, if you try to ease gridlock or congestion by widening the road by a lane, it will only work very briefly, until additional drivers incentivized or “induced” by the newly-built road space erase any gains made in congestion improvement, and soon you’re back where you started. This is captured by another common and funny refrain, “just one more lane, bro!”

We’ve known this for decades! Any urban planning that still ignores induced demand is fireable, shameful negligence and on a basic level doomed to fail.

Improving non-car travel options is the best way to “fix” traffic because it lets people who don’t want to drive leave their cars at home. Some people currently attached to their cars in our car-centric world may also decide to stop driving once presented with safe and attractive alternatives.

It’s a chicken and egg thing. Saying “nobody bikes in Toronto!” misses the point. Bike infrastructure here is abysmal, why would they? It’d kind of be like pointing at a forest with no roads in it, and therefore no cars, to prove that nobody likes driving. People adapt to what’s in front of them.

Want traffic to get worse? Here are some sure ways to do it. First, build a mega parking lot for 2,000+ cars beside a congested waterfront highway commuters use daily that’s also prone to flooding. Then, pour untold billions into building an underground mega highway underneath North America’s widest highway, Highway 401. Next, invest millions into destroying newly built cycling infrastructure, while also refusing to adequately fund what actually relieves traffic because it represents competition for the auto industry, public transportation.

Naturally, Doug Ford is committed to worsening car traffic in all these ways that will cost us billions of dollars and who knows how many lives. Streets will be more congested and dangerous instead of safe and vibrant. When Ford’s plans do absolutely nothing to relieve congestoin, his supporters will use Bike lanes as a scapegoat.

The Bloor bike lane was selected specifically to connect local cyclists to Canada’s busiest subway line. Ensuring safe and seamless connectivity between public transit and active transportation is sensible urban planning 101. Why wouldn’t Canada’s busiest subway line be connected to bike lanes?

The opponents of bike lanes feel no reason to read about this at a planning level at all because this bungling incompetent and corrupt premier acts on all their assumptions and desires before they can even write him a strongly-worded email. There’s no guarantee that urban planners will get all or even any of the details right and I’m not saying every recommendation they make in Toronto is automatically the right decision, but the anti-bike lane people are objectively wrong, yet feel very above needing to hear or read about any other opinion.

Maybe I’m just another crazed downtown yahoo in the war against the car! But let me ask: if we all agree planning shouldn’t be emotional and we all support following the data wherever it leads, what data justifies ripping up bike lanes? What data suggests that bike lanes worsen traffic?

When they produce real studies with real citations and not torqued, cooked numbers to merely give the appearance of relying impartially on data, I’ll shut up. I suspect I’ll be waiting forever.