This past week the Ontario government introduced legislation that will be incredibly damaging to Ontario’s environment. Bill 212 will fast track construction of highway 413 by removing the requirement for it to go through an environmental assessment. The bill will also will allow the province to override municipal planning departments and limit the installation or force the removal of bike lanes in Ontario’s cities and towns. While this bill may be brilliant politics, it is terrible public policy. Here’s why.
Earlier this year UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres implored world leaders to take aggressive steps to reduce carbon emissions and eliminate our dependency on fossil fuels as quickly as possible. He said, “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet. We need an exit ramp off the climate highway to hell.”
Most people are concerned about climate change yet are under the illusion that it’s someone else’s problem to fix. Or that, if we can’t fix it because the problem is too large, then we will just have to learn to adapt. The reality is we cannot adapt our way out of what’s coming for us if we continue at our current rate of modest transition. Being bolder means that everyone must do their part, change something.
A low hanging fruit for reducing carbon emissions in Brampton is changing the way we move. Transportation is our biggest carbon emitter. And there is plenty of opportunity to transition the hundreds of thousands of short trips under 5 km taken in this City every day by car, to more sustainable means like walking, cycling, micro mobility, and transit.


Getting people out of their cars is a challenge. We’ve built a culture that reveres car travel for its freedom and convenience Cars are marketed as an extension of our personality and a symbol of our success. But car culture has significant downsides.
With the majority of cars on the road today carrying only one person, they are very inefficient at moving people. They take up a lot of public space both for moving them from one place to another, and for storage. For example, cyclists make up approximately one third of all vehicles entering the Toronto’s Downtown core in the morning along Adelaide (32%) and leaving the Downtown Core in the afternoon along Richmond (30%). West of University Avenue. The cycle tracks on Richmond- Adelaide in the peak period direction, carry a higher volume of vehicles per lane than the motor vehicle lanes. Yet these lanes look comparatively empty compared to the car lanes that are barely moving.
Every person not in their car means more road space for those who must drive. Even a small car takes up about 6 times more road space than a bicycle. And a typical transit bus carries about 10 people in the same space as one car.
Cars are costly, to purchase, service and support on the roads. A car costs on average 10 times more per year to own and operate than a bicycle. If you include the tax-funded costs of providing and maintaining road space, that ratio increases to 30:1. [Bikenomics, Elly Blue, Microcosm Publishing, pg 13].
The most significant downside is that cars are very efficient killers and create significant negative health outcomes for the community. Almost 2,000 people die by car each year in Canada. Another 8,000 are seriously injured. Cars kill on average 307 pedestrians and 46 cyclists in Canada annually.
Cars are killers in other more subtle ways as well. Their exhaust contains particulates and noxious gases that cause lung and heart diseases including cancer. Health Canada estimates that 1,200 people in Canada die prematurely each year because of traffic related air pollution and cause about 2.7 million days to be lost due to asthma and other acute respiratory related incidents. Cars also dissuade us from getting sufficient daily physical activity leading to even more health related problems.
So, we have a vicious circle that is causing significant community damage. Car culture encourages us to drive. The wide, relatively open streets in Brampton encourage us to drive fast, in many cases faster than the posted speed limit allows. When things go wrong serious injury or death is too often the result. This makes people who may otherwise walk or bicycle to their destination opt to drive instead because they perceive the roads as being unsafe. This leads to more driving, more pollution and more congestion on the roads making it frustrating and unhealthy for all.
It doesn’t have to be this way. After years of work on Vision Zero campaigns, the cities of Helsinki and Oslo, (notably both very bike friendly cities), reported zero pedestrian fatalities in 2019. Even New York City, which has built a substantial cycling network and embraced Vision Zero, in 2023, recorded the lowest number of pedestrian deaths ever in the city. While the rate of deaths is still too high, it is less than half the rate from the 1990’s. These cities did this through a combination of education, enforcement and significant investments in safe cycling infrastructure including protected bike lanes.
A lot of people seem not to like bike lanes but they work. They make the roads safer for all road users. They reduce pollution and help to make the community healthier. And studies indicate that bicycle lanes can actually reduce gridlock by encouraging more people to ride instead of drive. The term build it and they will come applies to both road lanes and bike lanes. If municipalities build roads primarily for cars, that will be the primary travel choice and the roads will fill up with cars. On the other hand, if roads are build in such a way that encourages active travel, then more people will choose to leave the car at home and walk or cycling instead! And that’s good for everyone including car drivers.
Last Wednesday 16 people from Brampton, including several Brampton Environmental Alliance members cycled to Queens Park for a Rally and Ride event to protest the Province’s Bill 212 legislation. Over 700 cyclists from across the GTA flooded the south lawn and then joined in for a short ride along the Bloor and Avenue Rd. bike lanes. These lanes would be among the first ones on the Province’s list for removal should Bill 212 pass.
Brampton Council will be discussing bike lanes and the future of Active Transportation in our city at a public, Committee of Council meeting on Wednesday November 13 at 9:30 in Council Chambers. Our Council seems to be evenly split on the value of bike lanes with Mayor Brown and Councillor Santos as the primary champions. If Council decides to cancel or remove existing bike lanes in our city, it would go against the 2040 vision, make it more difficult for the City to meet carbon reduction targets, and make the roads even less safe while doing little to help traffic congestion.
Please let us know your thoughts on bike lanes and highways in Brampton. email us at info@bramptonea.org . It’s time for an adult discussion!
See the latest post on the BikeBrampton website for video links and more information.
