Murray Wood: Who's hot... and who's not
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TORONTO — Ontario’s top court cleared the way on Friday for the province to remove bike lanes in Toronto, overturning a lower-court ruling that found the plan created an unconstitutional risk to cyclist safety.
The Ontario Court of Appeal’s unanimous ruling found the lower court judgment would have effectively created a right to bike lanes where none exists.
The strongly worded decision said the lower court judge had not only misapplied the law but strayed into policy-making and political considerations.
“Something has gone wrong,” Justice Grant Huscroft wrote in Friday’s ruling.
Governments were free to change or repeal policy choices made by their predecessors, the ruling said, even if it went against expert advice.
“Policy is for politics. Whether courts think legislation is wise or unwise is irrelevant so far as its constitutionality is concerned, and constitutionality is the only question with which courts are legitimately concerned,” it said.
The ruling was immediately hailed as a victory by Premier Doug Ford’s government.
“We’ve always been clear: bike lanes should go where they make sense, on secondary roads, not at the expense of vehicle lanes on the busiest streets,” Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria said in a statement.
The cycling group behind the court challenge acknowledged Friday’s ruling as a setback but said the facts on the ground had not changed. They pointed to statistics from a 2024 city report that found 28 people had been killed and 380 seriously injured while cycling in Toronto over the past decade, mostly on streets without protected bike lanes.
“Bike lanes do not cause traffic congestion. Ripping them out will put people’s lives at risk,” said Michael Longfield, executive director of Cycle Toronto.
“This legislation isn’t sound transportation policy, it’s a costly distraction from the government’s real responsibilities and stoking a culture war.”
At issue was a provincial law passed in 2024 to remove 19 kilometres of protected bike lanes along Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue. The law was challenged by a group of cyclists, including a bike courier and a university student, who argued the plan amounted to an unconstitutional safety risk.
In a ruling last year, Superior Court Justice Paul Schabas agreed.
He found the government pursued the plan even though its own advisers and external experts broadly agreed it would not accomplish its stated goal to reduce traffic congestion, and could possibly make it worse. Even when accepting the goal at face value, the judge found the harm caused to cyclists would be way out of step with the law’s intent to save some drivers “a few minutes of travel time.”
In Friday’s ruling, Huscroft wrote there was “much that is wrong with this reasoning.”
The Appeal Court said Schabas had trivialized the legislation’s stated purpose to reduce traffic congestion and at the same time inflated the negative impacts of removing bike lanes.
“Removing bicycle lanes is in no way analogous to imposing a sentence of life imprisonment for spitting on the sidewalk or exposing citizens to a high risk of being murdered to prevent nuisances. It is mere traffic regulation and cannot be described as ‘draconian,’” Huscroft wrote.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Aug. 14, 2026.
Jordan Omstead, The Canadian Press
