‘People will get hurt’: Cyclists protest after Ontario government passes law to remove bike lanes in Toronto 

For the past few years, Toronto has been transforming into a certifiably cyclist-friendly city, installing miles of new, protected bike lanes.

At first, the idea was to temporarily help with social distancing during the pandemic. Later, due to their popularity, the bike lanes were made permanent. This was one way that Toronto, like many cities around the globe, was working on improving bicycle infrastructure. 

But not everyone was on board. Late last year, Ontario Premier Doug Ford introduced legislation to dismantle bike lanes on major roads, citing in a press conference report that Toronto streets are the most congested in America and third most globally.

“They’re backed up from here to Timbuktu in the cars,” Ford said. “People do not want the bike lanes.”

Ontario’s government approved his measure in November and plans to remove bike lanes as early as late March.

The backlash from Canadian cyclists has been swift. In November of 2024, hundreds of people showed up to protest Ford’s controversial bike lane bill.

“There are real repercussions to this removal of bike lanes. People will get hurt, and people will die,” said Marie LeBlanc Flanagan, a longtime cyclist and video game designer. 

After Bill 212 passed, she said she decided to work on a sort of digital protest: a game about how difficult it is to bike in Toronto with no protection.

“It had been a seed in my mind for many years. Since I moved to Toronto many years ago, I noticed how difficult it is to ride in the space that I call the ‘loser lane,’” she said.

She named the game Loser Lane for the space where bikers are forced to confront delivery trucks, park cars and open doors when there aren’t protected bike lanes. 

In her creation, a player uses the arrow keys on their computer to avoid getting hit. The catch is, it’s unwinnable, and the player always dies — a grim joke about the city’s looming future, which Flanagan said she’s surprised went viral.

“When I released the game, I thought that my friends would laugh and my mom would be worried,” she said. “That was the response I expected. And I just got an enormous response.”

That enormous response may be because, to cyclists around Toronto, the threat of death isn’t just a game — it’s daily life. Despite the recently added protected lanes, 2024 was the deadliest year on record for cyclists in the city, with six deaths — double the average per year.

Michael Longfield is the executive director of the advocacy group Cycle Toronto, which has filed an injunction to block Ford’s law.

Longfield is currently recovering from a broken femur after being hit by a door in an unprotected bike lane. 

“I ended up in the hospital, in the emergency room,” he said. “I’m still recovering at home from surgery. It’s been seven weeks. I’m still on crutches.”

To experts, Longfield’s accident is among many that prove protected bike lanes are necessary for cyclists’ safety.

“If we look at the data on injuries and fatal collisions on urban streets, including streets in Toronto, many of them you will see happened in areas where bicyclists were not physically protected,” with infrastructure, said Raktim Mitra, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who studies bike lanes across the globe.

According to Mitra, not only would removing protected lanes be harmful to cyclists, but also, in the long term, it could hurt efforts to reduce traffic.

“If more and more people are switching from driving to bicycling, then we don’t need as much space for driving,” he said, adding that more bike lanes, not fewer would help ease congestion.

While the numbers are still relatively small, Mitra and other experts say that more bike lanes, not fewer, would help ease congestion in the future. A recent study he conducted found that cyclists were more than twice as likely to bike nearly every day for commuting after the addition of bike lanes.

Even still, Ford and his allies are moving forward with the proposal.

Ford himself declined an interview for this story. In defending the bike lane removal, Ontario’s minister of transportation said in a statement, “We need to deliver on our plan to keep people moving by bringing sanity back to bike lanes.”