Authors:
- Kate Allen, Climate Change Reporter
- Mahdis Habibinia, City Hall Bureau
September 26, 2024
When Doug Ford doubled down with his comments on bike lanes this week, he did more than reject one of the city’s strategies to get people moving. He also threw a wrench in a plan that is arguably even more consequential: Toronto’s climate goals.
Passenger vehicles are the city’s second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. One of the primary ways council hopes to rapidly reduce reliance on these fossil fuels is by expanding the cycling network — a plan that could be stymied if the province wants to limit where new lanes can be installed.
Calculating an emissions “price tag” for any limit on bike lanes is difficult. But experts say the message that this move sends may be even more harmful to progress on the climate crisis.
“I think the message is important because it looks like a lot of the consensus around climate action may be collapsing precisely at the moment when the impacts are becoming more and more apparent — as we’re dealing with fires and floods and extreme weather and all the rest,” said Mark Winfield, a professor in York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.
Last week, sources confirmed to the Star that Ford is planning to override municipal powers by introducing legislation in October that would block the construction of new bike lanes if it means losing a lane for cars, buses, trucks and other traffic. On Monday, Ford defended those plans, saying bike lanes should be kept to secondary streets.
Mayor Olivia Chow this week was careful to emphasize her partnership with the province, but she also cited the toll of climate change and air pollution on Toronto residents.
“This is serious,” Chow said in response to a question about the climate plan impacts of limiting bike lanes, citing kids who struggle with asthma and the wildfire-fuelled smog that enveloped the city last summer.
Council has set a target for the city to become carbon neutral by 2040. To do that, it will have to achieve massive reductions to its biggest sources of greenhouses gases, the top two of which are buildings and transportation. Toronto’s biggest source of emissions is the use of natural gas to heat residential buildings, which accounts for 30 per cent of the city’s overall emissions. Gas consumption in passenger vehicles is the second-biggest, at almost a quarter of the total.
For emissions from transportation, the city’s climate strategy, TransformTO, has two goals. One is to switch to electric vehicles and other low-carbon transportation. The other is for residents to use “active transportation” — walking or cycling — for three-quarters of all shorter trips to school and work.
Expanding and improving the cycling network is an “essential” part of meeting this goal, according to the strategy. The city has increased funding and capacity in order to do that, including spending $30 million on bikeways in 2023, the most it has ever invested in a single year.
Staff reports have consistently found that adding and improving lanes results in vastly more cyclists on these roads. At Adelaide and Richmond Streets at Spadina Avenue, for example, cyclist counts jumped from 562 in 2013 to 3,763 in 2022, an increase of 570 per cent, and the number of people using the city’s Bike Share system spiked from about 665,000 trips in 2015 to more than 4.5 million in 2022, according to a report from May.
Nonetheless, the city is not on track to meet its climate goals, with emissions trending up rather than down. In order just to achieve its interim target next year, Toronto would need to remove one megatonne of emissions from its 2021 total, the equivalent of taking 293,643 gas-powered cars off the road, the city says.
Patricia Wood, a professor in York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, said that Toronto’s climate goals are “good, but they are not especially ambitious, in view of the challenges we face” and that Toronto has “a long way to go to catch up with other cities in their installation of good cycling infrastructure,” including Montreal and Calgary.
“So to have the province even float the idea of reducing the possibility to create space for active transportation by prioritizing private automobiles over bike lanes is a truly poisonous intervention in these discussions. Even debating this only drags us backwards and wastes our time,” Wood said.
Six cyclists have been killed on city roads this year, a tragic total highlighted in the coverage of the leaked legislative changes. But Wood also noted that climate change itself extracts a deadly toll.
“We must reduce the use of private automobiles in cities. Their emissions and pollution are literally killing people — even before we get to the injuries and deaths from collisions.”
It’s not clear how much of a dent the province’s legislation, if enacted, would put in Toronto’s progress to meeting its emissions targets. While replacing a trip in a gas-powered car with a trip by bike is obviously a fossil fuel savings, it’s hard to measure the sum total of a network of bike lanes amidst the constant flux and change in neighbourhoods generally, experts say. It is also true that the more cars and trucks have to idle as they are stuck in traffic, the more emissions they produce.
In addition, it’s not clear how many of the city’s proposed bike lanes would be affected by the legislation, which has not yet been introduced. Many of the projects proposed over the next two years are still in the conceptual design phase, according to Jacquelyn Hayward, director of planning, design & management for transportation services at city hall.
Only a small percentage of key projects could require removing a vehicle traffic lane, Hayward said. That list includes these bikeways, which are either undergoing public consultation or are already approved by council:
- Danforth Avenue between Victoria Park and Kingston Avenues
- Parkside Drive between Keele subway station and the Martin Goodman Trail
- Eglinton TOday Complete Street, which extends between Keele and Mount Pleasant,
- Scarborough Golf Club Road
- Gerrard Street East
The city has a chicken and egg problem in trying to measure the impact of its cycling network, said Raktim Mitra, director of Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning.
“We don’t have a citywide network of bicycle” lanes, Mitra said, which reduces residents’ willingness to use the lanes that do exist.
“For us to be in a position where bike lanes can save measurable amounts of GHGs, we need to first build that network,” he adds.
With files from Ben Cohen and David Rider