Ford government wins court appeal clearing way for Toronto bike lane removal

TORONTO — The future of bike lanes on three major Toronto streets was thrown back into limbo on Friday as Ontario’s top court overturned a ruling that blocked the province’s bid to remove them.

A lower court last year stopped the province from replacing protected bike lanes with car lanes along 19 kilometres of Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue, ruling it posed an unconstitutional risk to cyclist safety.

But in a unanimous and strongly worded ruling Friday, a panel of three Ontario Court of Appeal judges found that judgment had effectively created a right to bike lanes where none existed. The lower court judge had not only misapplied the law but strayed into policy-making and political considerations, the ruling said.

“Something has gone wrong,” Justice Grant Huscroft wrote.

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. Ford had previously called the lower court decision ridiculous and ideological, using it to muse about whether judges should be elected.

“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 had argued in court there were no feasible alternatives to moving targeted portions of bike lanes to secondary roads without creating disconnected and more dangerous stretches.

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 2024 law passed by the province that required municipalities to seek approval to install new bike lanes that cut into traffic. The fast-tracked law also empowered the province to remove the Yonge, University and Bloor bike lane stretches.

Ford had long complained that bike lanes created gridlock, in particular on a stretch of Bloor Street a short drive from his west-end home.

The law was challenged by Cycle Toronto, a bike courier and a bike-commuting university student who argued the lane removal plan was 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.”

An engineering report commissioned by the province found any congestion benefits from ripping out bike lanes would be negligible or short-lived, the cyclists had argued in court. The same report found bike lanes were predicted to reduce crashes among all road users by between 35 and 50 per cent.

The government’s move to amend the legislation while the case was being decided — under its new wording, bike lanes would be “reconfigured” rather than removed — was effectively a distinction without a difference that could be seen as an attempt to evade his judgment, Schabas found.

Cyclists were not trying to impose a right to bike lanes on the government under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Schabas found. Rather, it was a request to strike down legislation that put people at risk by removing bike lanes.

The Appeal Court said that distinction was “not tenable.” If the Charter prevents bike lane removals because of the protection they provide, it can only be because there was a constitutional right to them in the first place.

The Appeal Court also rejected Schabas’s ruling that the law was arbitrary because experts found it would not in the long term reduce congestion. The proper question was not whether the policy worked as intended, but whether there was any logical connection between adding lanes for vehicle traffic and reducing congestion, it said.

Huscroft said the lower court had also understated the goal of reducing congestion while overstating the consequences of a bike lane removal. Whatever the merits of the policy, removing a bike lane did not rise to a rare case where a court must stop a government action grossly out of proportion from its aims.

“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.

A spokesperson for Mayor Olivia Chow said she had been working with the province on “win-win” solutions to restore car lines while “maintaining safe cycling infrastructure.” Work has been completed to restore a car lane and keep the bike lane on a short stretch of Bloor Street between Kipling and Islington subways station, Chow’s press secretary Braman Thillainathan said in a statement.

“She resists any argument that pits road users against each other because it makes everyone less safe,” Thillainathan said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Aug. 14, 2026.

Jordan Omstead, The Canadian Press