Doug Ford amps up bike lane rhetoric, questions mount for cities [Video]

In a speech at Toronto’s Empire Club on Thursday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford said explicitly what his transport minister implied earlier this week: the province is willing to tear out existing municipal bike lanes on major thoroughfares.

“It isn’t enough to keep an eye on future bike lanes,” Ford told the paying audience. “We need to and will remove and replace existing bike lanes on primary roads that are bringing traffic in our cities to a standstill.”

Ford said removing existing lanes, often installed at a cost of millions of dollars to municipal taxpayers, is part of a larger focus on “getting drivers moving faster by bringing sanity back to bike lane decisions.”

The premier’s comments follow an announcement Tuesday that his government will introduce legislation forcing local governments to get provincial approval for any new bike lanes that remove a lane of vehicle traffic. Furthermore, Minister of Transportation Prabmeet …