Canadians support bike infrastructure, just not the road: study

A cyclist rides on a protected bike lane on Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge on May 29, 2023. (CTV News)

A new Nanos Research study reveals that a majority of Canadians support spending tax dollars on building bicycle infrastructure off the road, but that bike lanes on roads worsen traffic flow.

“It speaks to the challenge that people see with bike lanes,” said pollster Nik Nanos in a Wednesday interview with CTV News.

“There’s a problem, but there’s also a potential solution, at least, that a majority of Canadians support.”

Through a random survey of 1,010 Canadian adults commissioned for CTV News and conducted online and over the phone, the study found more than two in three Canadians at least somewhat supported spending on urban bicycle infrastructure apart from roadways to reduce the need for bike lanes. Just under three in five Canadians agreed that bike lanes on the roads themselves worsen traffic.

Shoshanna Saxe, a Canada research chair in sustainable infrastructure at the University of Toronto, says the survey results suggest that perhaps many Canadians don’t have a good understanding of the function of bike lanes, since there are very few of them across the country.

“We have chosen for the last 80 years to invest mostly in cars as a way to get around. And so, we don’t have much understanding of other ways of doing things,” she said in an interview.

Saxe says studies conducted around the world have shown that bike lanes don’t worsen traffic flow, and in fact, help to improve it.

“In Toronto, we’ve checked over and over again; (commute) times haven’t changed,” said Saxe.

“The emergency response groups say that their response times have held comparable with the rest of the city, or sometimes sped up. We’ve checked in Montreal, Paris, New York; I mean, I could just go on.”

But installing bike lanes hasn’t always been a smooth ride for cities in Canada, where commuters and governments alike have found themselves in different lanes on the issue.

Following an 18-month pilot project in 2016, Calgary City Council voted to make a controversial bike network permanent. Some residents raised concerns that the added bike lanes could lead to increased traffic and parking problems.

The criticisms echoed similar sentiments from Vancouver in 2009, when a permanent cycling lane opened on the Burrard Street Bridge, southwest of the downtown core.

Some local leaders and community members were critical at the time that the installation would increase traffic congestion. Fast-forward to today, and city officials say the Burrard bike lane is among the busiest routes in North America, with 1.2 million cycling trips yearly – without producing gridlock.

Despite the success in Vancouver, Canada’s largest city could see itself back-pedaling on its existing bike lanes. In October, the Ontario government tabled a bill that would require provincial sign-off on new bike lanes that remove a lane of vehicle traffic. The province later added a regulation that would see sections of existing bike lanes on three major Toronto roads ripped out of the ground.

“The city will be slower and have worse traffic overall. I think that it’s a bad idea to try to do this just because we wish the roads worked a different way,” said U of T’s Saxe.

The assumption would be that opening up more lanes for cars would reduce congestion, but Ralph Buehler, a professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech Research Center, says in practice, the opposite is true; a phenomenon dubbed “induced traffic.”

“If we add a car travel lane, we are making driving easier, and there are more cars. And over time, there will be traffic congestion again because more people are switching to driving,” he said.