The High Cost of Indecision: Taxpayers Face Double-Bill for Bike Lane Chaos
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire
City Hall spent millions to install lanes that the province is now ordering to be ripped up, leaving residents to foot the bill for a planning failure.
City Hall is once again staring down a financial abyss, and this time, it is a hole of its own making. After spending years and millions of dollars installing bike lanes across some of Toronto's most congested arteries, the city is now facing the prospect of paying to tear them right back up.
As CBC Toronto first reported, Ontario's transportation ministry announced Tuesday that it will proceed with the removal and reconfiguration of bike lanes to restore motor vehicle lanes. The targeted areas include Avenue Road, Yonge Street, Bloor Street, University Avenue, Queen's Park, and Queen's Park Crescent.
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**OPINION: A Monument to Waste**
Let's be clear: this is a catastrophic failure of urban planning. The city spent a fortune to implement a vision that is now being dismantled by the province. Whether you support the lanes or the cars, the only certainty here is the waste. We are paying for the installation, and now we are paying for the demolition. It is a textbook example of government inefficiency where the taxpayer is the only one losing.
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The financial toll of this reversal is already looming. Kate Lear, a spokesperson for the city, told CBC Toronto that $27 million was spent to install bike lanes across a 3.2-kilometre stretch of Yonge Street, a 13-kilometre stretch of Bloor Street, and approximately 3.6 kilometres around Queen's Park and University Avenue.
Ironically, removing these lanes may cost even more than putting them in. In a 2024 report presented to council, the city estimated that removing the full 19-kilometre stretch identified by the Ford government would cost $48 million—a figure the province rejected at the time. Margaret Parkhill, an engineer with the consulting firm Arup who worked on the Yonge Street and Bloor Street W. projects, told CBC Toronto that removing or reconfiguring lanes is "not a simple task" and noted that the cost of removal is likely to be about the same as the cost of adding them. Parkhill pointed out that beyond road reconstruction, the city must also overhaul parking infrastructure, traffic signals, and signage.
While Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria argued during a Tuesday news conference that removing these lanes will alleviate the $56 billion annual economic cost of gridlock, he has remained vague on the specifics of the bill. Charlotte Carron, a spokesperson for the transportation ministry, declined to specify which level of government would pay for the project, stating only that Sarkaria's previous comments stand.
This ambiguity leaves taxpayers in limbo. Jeff Casello, a professor of transportation planning and engineering at the University of Waterloo, told CBC Toronto that while road maintenance is typically a municipal responsibility, the core question remains whether the province will cover the cost or push the financial burden onto the city.
As Myer Siemiatycki, a professor emeritus of politics at Toronto Metropolitan University, told CBC Toronto, the move appears to be a "wasteful use of public funds" coming from a premier who claims to value the tax dollars of Ontarians. Whether the final bill is $48 million or higher, the result is the same: a massive expenditure of public money to return the city to a state it had already spent millions to leave behind.