Bike lanes and bus lanes have become hot-button political issues as the city grapples with how to allocate valuable road space.
Dozens of people crowd a cafe patio on Bathurst Street this sunny afternoon, spilling on to the surrounding sidewalk.
Signs saying “Neighbourhood at Risk” plaster the patio’s walls.
The crowd, mostly residents and business owners, listen quietly as some speak at a podium, detailing the misery they say city hall’s latest transit plan is about to unleash.
The TTC wants to take a lane of traffic in each direction along this busy thoroughfare — home to businesses big and small, and along which thousands of commuters ride each day — and dedicate them exclusively to bus use, part of a plan called RapidTO.
Speaker after speaker from Project Bathurst, formed to keep cars in those lanes, emphasizes that they are not “anti-transit” — they just don’t want to lose on-street parking they say their customers use. They’re unconvinced by arguments that better transit will benefit them.
“Bathurst is for the people!” one man yells.
This weeks-old campaign against a red-painted priority bus lane is just one battle in a citywide war over clashing visions for the future of Toronto streets: one with more transit and pedestrian-friendly roads versus one where the car remains king.
Today, on Bathurst and elsewhere in the city, there appears to be no middle road.
Organizing at the grassroots
While city streets have always been political battlegrounds — from the cancelled Spadina Expressway to the streetcar priority corridor on King Street — the number of groups formed to fight transit or bike lanes has exploded since the pandemic as drivers returned in droves and Toronto’s booming construction shut down whole blocks, triggering record gridlock.
What were once grassroots, often ragtag, opposition efforts gave way to sophisticated organizing, paid lobbying and high-tech public opinion campaigns.
On Bathurst, small businesses opposed to the dedicated bus lanes of RapidTO were quick to mobilize with a sleek website, posters with QR codes and media-savvy members. Too quick, according to critics of videos that feature AI-faked, but realistic-looking, “residents” created by one of the anti-Bathurst bus lane groups.
Groups like TTCriders — a volunteer transit advocacy organization — have also mobilized for the bus lane battle, canvassing outside of Bathurst Station and running a social media campaign to rally support for rapid transit.
While Toronto has long had local associations for neighbourhood concerns, observers say the city has seen a jump in the creation of advocacy groups — some local, some citywide — with a road focus. Bikes on Bloor and Cycle Toronto are examples focused on getting people out of cars and onto bikes, arguing it will help ease gridlock.
Progress Toronto, a left-wing advocacy group that has influenced local elections across the city, has also argued in support of bike and bus lanes. Saman Tabasinejad, the group’s executive director, said the debate over the roads has reached a “boiling point after decades of inaction from the municipal and other levels of government not investing in transit.”
“The tactics that people use to advocate for things has changed,” added Tabasinejad. “You’ve got AI, the internet, social media. How you get people excited or angry about something has definitely changed.”
On the other side of the debate, local groups like Balance on Bloor push to remove bike lanes on the Kingsway in Etobicoke, while the Downtown Concerned Citizens Association, pressure city hall to remove bike lanes along The Esplanade.
At the citywide level, Progress Toronto’s right-leaning equivalent is A Better City (ABC) Toronto, which is taking aim at bikeways on main streets.
“I do see people way more engaged in municipal politics these days than I feel like I’ve ever seen them before,” said Ariella Kimmel, ABC Toronto’s executive director. “People are starting to realize that a lot of these day-to-day issues that impact their lives are predominantly handled by the city.”
Cities take on drivers
Other cities are moving quickly to de-prioritize vehicles, making streets more friendly to pedestrians, cyclists and transit users in a bid to humanize urban highways and reduce carbon emissions.
Paris is turning more than 500 streets into pedestrian zones after two-thirds of residents said yes in a referendum. London is banning cars from a 1.1-kilometre stretch of busy downtown Oxford Street. New York’s controversial fee on drivers entering Manhattan in prime hours has cut congestion by one-quarter.
Closer to home, Montreal under Mayor Valerie Plante has taken aim at car dominance, continuously expanding bike lanes and pedestrianizing eight streets in the summer to let people stroll to 1,300 businesses.
In Toronto, confrontations in the so-called “war on car” have varied in intensity and frequency. It accelerated under former mayor Rob Ford who promised to bury transit expansion and removed bike lanes on Jarvis Street — a car-centric view his brother, Premier Doug Ford, carries on a decade later.
Even good-faith attempts at making communities less car reliant have met with pushback throughout the GTA from fringe groups claiming that such plans are part of a global conspiracy to strip citizens of their freedoms.
Now, almost any reduction in private vehicle priority seems guaranteed to spark road rage, at city hall or in Queen’s Park, with debate around data, facts and consultation.
A change in tone
Former Willowdale councillor John Filion, who fought for a remake of north Yonge Street, including separated bike lanes, saw firsthand the transformation of community consultation and debate.
Residents who attended early briefings tended to be engaged and open-minded about potential change, he said. But he found himself fighting an uphill battle against others too busy or unengaged to attend.
Most planning experts agree on the idea of “induced demand”: build a bike lane and more people will bike. That applies equally to cars: build more lanes or roads, and more people will choose to drive.
Still, the idea that bike lanes cause traffic chaos by taking away a lane from cars “was just such an easy message,” Filion said. “Whereas it took you an hour and a half to properly explain why it wasn’t going to cause more congestion.”
Still, the opposition group that included a once-jailed political fundraiser was not particularly organized or effective, Filion says, compared to a later well-funded and shrewdly targeted campaign that delayed a supportive housing project on Cummer Avenue for years.
A big factor, he believes, is the rise of social media which spreads messages to tens of thousands of people in an instant with no guarantees of accuracy. What was once a give-and-take discussion about our roads is now linked to a broader, entrenched culture war.
“The old ways of engaging your constituents and … everybody being open to the idea of a solution — those days seem to be gone in most neighbourhoods,” he said.
Dianne Saxe, the councillor whose ward encompasses the most contentious parts of the Bathurst bus lane, said she hasn’t had anyone scream at her over them — yet. Saxe proposed a motion earlier this month that would see no bus lanes between Bloor and Dupont.
Road changes have always been contentious, she said, but since the pandemic there’s been a “pervasive loss of emotional self-regulation” making compromise harder to find.
Taking aim at bike lanes
Bike lane debates, often heated but eventually producing plan modifications and installations on arterials such as Queens Quay, the Danforth and Bloor West, caught the attention of Ford in the runup to the most recent provincial election.
He ordered the removal of several council-approved and city-funded lanes, promising to “return sanity to bike lanes” by getting them off main streets to reduce gridlock. He took up the cause of Balance on Bloor, ordering the scrapping of the westernmost extension of the Bloor bikeway.
Much as Protect Bathurst says it supports transit lanes, just not on Bathurst, Cody MacRae, a Balance on Bloor organizer, said his group “supports bike lanes where they make sense, when they are implemented properly and when proper consultation is done.”
In response to the Ford government’s moves, cycling advocates launched a Charter challenge, citing internal provincial documents warning that bike lane removals would not ease congestion, but could increase collision risk and negatively impact businesses.
Meanwhile, with the lanes still in, 40 Etobicoke business owners are suing the city, local councillor Amber Morley and a city transportation official, alleging “negligence and nuisance” over an installation the group says must be reversed.
Affordability plays a role
Morley sees Toronto’s intensifying battles over who gets space on city roads as “old guard” residents trying to protect their privilege.
“We’re at this moment where privileges we have traditionally prioritized — access to cars, multiple vehicles per household in our suburban communities — are now coming into conflict with the level of density and growth pressures, and frankly affordability, within our city,” she said.
The affordability crisis has pushed a generation of young people into vertical living, with no driveway even if they can afford a car, she said.
“You shouldn’t have to be a privileged person to navigate the city safely, to live, work and play here — and to not die for deciding to take a bike,” she added.
Nuanced debate gets lost
ABC Toronto’s Kimmel sees inflexible “ideology” behind the city’s installation of bike lanes — many of them approved under former mayor John Tory — and bus lanes as well as speed cameras, and attempts to shut down debate.
“We can’t have real conversations anymore because no one can talk nuance,” said Kimmel.
Businesses speaking out against RapidTO are painted as “rich and evil,” opposing bike lanes for “their pocketbook,” Kimmel said. In reality, she said they are small businesses worried about losing customers, asking “Is this idea the best possible way to fix what’s happening on Bathurst or Dufferin?”
Progress Toronto’s Tabasinejad argues that groups like ABC Toronto are “not offering actual solutions to make people’s lives better. They’re campaigning against bike lanes when there are a ton of streets without bike lanes where people are still stuck in traffic.”
A way through the traffic jam
Matti Siemiatycki, director of U of T’s Infrastructure Institute, said the fight reflects the differences in how people choose to move in a rapidly growing Toronto.
“We’re a city that has a core that’s transit and cycling and pedestrian friendly that’s surrounded by a very big auto-oriented area — and it was built that way,” said Siemiatycki.
Trouble is, as the city rapidly grows — by more than 200,000 people last year — “you’re just not going to be able to accommodate all of those people in cars,” he said.
Other cities successful in moving away from car infrastructure may offer Toronto clues for a way forward. Though they have been “far more assertive,” said Siemiatycki, they have also been more transparent about their goals and progress — or lack thereof — in meeting them.
In contrast, the TTC has faced criticism for how it tracks on-time service for buses and streetcars during rush hour, with its opaque performance metrics being singled out by critics for obscuring how it really serves the commuters.
“You might win the battle and lose the war if the implementation (of a transit program) is rough, and if you’re not showing, over the long-term, that these projects are actually delivering the benefits that they claim,” Siemiatycki said.
He said the city needs to provide better public data, so that it can adjust transit projects depending on the results.
He pointed to New York, where data on the congestion charge’s effect on traffic, Siemiatycki said, has been key to keeping the program in place amidst threats from the U.S. federal government to derail it.
“Just saying that these things work and that they deliver benefits has not been effective.”