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Earlier this week, we joined forces with passionate advocates to stand against Doug Ford's anti-bike lane legislation. Ecology Ottawa's Interim Executive Director, William van Geest, addressed the crowd at a rally against bike lane removal legislation. Please read our remarks below.
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It’s been a huge struggle to get bike infrastructure in Ontario. Only recently has adding bike lanes become a normal part of road reconstruction, and only recently have they become good-quality, with physical protection and obstacle-free—and still not all of them. These years of neglect show: anyone who’s tried to bike to the grocery store, or the doctor, or to a park, or to a hardware store, knows that 95% of the time, your route will involve biking beside cars, beside 2- or 3-tonne vehicles. So our bike network in Ottawa is a patchwork, and while we have 6,000 km of roads, we have 25 km of physically separated biking facilities.
The few bike lanes are usually hard-won. In normal projects, they involve hours of consultations, while road widenings sail through approval—like the $20-million Earl Grey underpass did earlier this year. For the Churchill* bike lanes, Ottawans had to organize group rides; for the Laurier lane in front of City Hall, it took someone being killed by a driver; for the Wellington lanes—such as they are—it took a convoy.
Doug Ford wants to undo all this hard-won progress. He can’t stand that people are getting around efficiently, enjoyably, healthily while he’s in his SUV, sitting behind other cars. He refuses to admit that the cars are the traffic, that he’s the traffic. Instead of tackling the problem, he’s taking it out on people biking. If he wanted to get cars moving, he’d add bike lanes, and thus take cars off the road. If he wanted to get cars moving, he’d provide funding for Ottawa’s transit.
We need to get people biking. Biking moves people 6 to 12 times more efficiently than driving. Biking makes people happy; it improves our mental health. Bike lanes use space more efficiently, meaning more room for trees, boulevard gardens, benches, lemonade stands—whatever. Biking reduces our emissions—dramatically. They’re even good for business.
In Ottawa, transportation is 40% of our GHG emissions. We’ve also committed to over half of trips being sustainable modes by 2046. We’ve promised to achieve net-zero by 2050. If we have any hope of hitting these targets, we need safe bike lanes—and everywhere. Doug Ford has it exactly backward. So does our mayor, Mark Sutcliffe, who in his mayor campaign opposed bike lanes—and who, when as mayor he finally took a stand for something, decided it would be against the National Capital Commission’s Bike Days.
It’s time our leaders stood up for Ottawans, for our safety, for our well-being, for our future. It’s time they enacted real solutions to transportation problems. It’s time they got serious about reducing emissions, about not paving over every inch of God’s green earth.
We call on Doug Ford to withdraw Bill 212, and start funding actual transportation solutions. We call on Mayor Sutcliffe to work for all Ottawans, not just car owners. This is the way to a future with safe, low-emissions, sensible mobility.
* In our remarks, we referred in error to Holland Ave.
Ecology Ottawa's Interim Executive Director, William van Geest, addressing the crowd at a rally against bike lane removal legislation on November 6, 2024. Photo by Erik Stolpmann.
