Ontario’s government has restarted the physical removal of Toronto bike lanes on Bloor Street West, but has not said how long the stretch being converted is, when the remaining 19 kilometres of protected lanes will follow, or who will absorb a removal bill the city pegged at $48 million and the province has rejected.
The Ministry of Transportation announced on Sept. 1 that it had issued a request for proposals covering bike lanes on Bloor Street, Yonge Street, University Avenue, Queen’s Park, Queen’s Park Crescent and Avenue Road, according to a provincial news release carried by CP24 and CTV News. The release said work would begin “immediately” on Bloor Street West, starting east of a 600-metre section at Clissold Road where vehicle lanes were restored in December 2025 — a detail that makes this a resumption rather than a first cut. The province said that segment was chosen because “minimal design work is required.”
“Our government was given a clear and direct mandate by the people of Ontario to fight gridlock, including by restoring motor vehicle lanes that are needed to keep drivers moving,” Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria said in a written statement.
What the release does not do is commit the province to removing everything. By its own terms, the RFP is to “study and provide design options” for the six corridors, and will also “identify options to retain or reconfigure bike lanes, where they make sense and do not make gridlock worse.” That is a procurement step, not a demolition schedule. Beyond the unspecified Bloor segment, no corridor has a published start date, and the province has not released a length, a cost or a completion target for any of them.
The financial picture behind that gap has been on the record since 2024 and has not been resolved. A City of Toronto staff report released after the Ford government tabled Bill 212 on Oct. 21, 2024, estimated removal would cost at least $48 million and would write off the roughly $27 million the city had already spent installing the lanes, according to CBC News and NOW Toronto. The report also flagged costs it could not yet quantify: designing and building replacement cycling routes, and the staff time and construction needed to rebuild the roads for motor vehicles. The province has publicly disputed the $48-million figure, and no agreement on who pays has been announced.
The same report contains a finding that sits awkwardly against a gridlock rationale. City staff calculated that removing the southbound bike lane on University Avenue would require restricting the street to a single southbound car lane for roughly nine months, and concluded that restoring vehicle lanes on the three corridors would “negatively impact driver travel time and businesses during construction, with likely minimal improvements in travel time once lanes are removed.” On the city’s own numbers, a policy sold as congestion relief begins with the better part of a year of lane closures.
Safety evidence in the report cuts the same way. Toronto recorded 28 cyclist deaths and 380 serious injuries between 2015 and the report’s release, with 68 per cent of those incidents occurring on streets lacking adequate cycling infrastructure. Staff also cited Toronto Metropolitan University research comparing collisions before and after separated lanes were built between 2000 and 2016, which found cycling volumes rose 2.57 times while collision rates on those streets fell 38 per cent, with a 35 per cent decline on surrounding streets.
The legal path is narrower than it was but not closed. On Aug. 14, the Court of Appeal for Ontario overturned Superior Court Justice Paul Schabas, holding that the Charter does not require governments to build or keep bike lanes and that “the Ontario legislature is as free to establish bicycle lanes as it is to remove them or authorize their removal.” Cycle Toronto, which brought the challenge with co-applicants Eva Stanger-Ross and Narada Kiondo, has not said whether it will seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada; executive director Michael Longfield said in August the group intended to “keep fighting this to the fullest extent of the law.”
All of it now runs through a municipal campaign. Toronto votes on Oct. 26, and bike lanes have become a live issue in the mayoral race, with incumbent Olivia Chow, Coun. Brad Bradford and former federal cabinet minister Chris Alexander each staking out positions on who should be making the call. Chow said the province should be “laser focused on dealing with Trump,” while both challengers framed the dispute as a failure of local governance. Whoever wins will inherit a removal program with one segment underway, five corridors under study and no settled answer on the bill.
via CP24 / CTV News. Original reporting: Ford government says it will move ahead with ripping out bike lanes on stretch of Bloor Street
Sourcing notes: Provincial announcement, RFP scope, the Clissold Road detail and the Sarkaria and Chow statements from the Sept. 1 CP24/CTV News report, corroborated against Canada’s National Observer, The Globe and Mail and Daily Commercial News. Cost figures ($48 million removal estimate, $27 million lost investment), the University Avenue nine-month single-lane projection, the travel-time conclusion, the cyclist casualty figures and the Toronto Metropolitan University collision research are from the City of Toronto staff report, as reported by CBC News and NOW Toronto. Court of Appeal ruling of Aug. 14, 2026 and the Cycle Toronto response via Canada’s National Observer, The Trillium and Ecojustice. Election date and candidate list from the City of Toronto. No exclusivity is claimed and no quotes have been paraphrased as direct speech.
