Two “ghost bikes” were delivered to the steps of Queen’s Park on Thursday night as hundreds of Torontonians and cycling advocates flooded the streets to protest the proposed removal of bike lanes in the city.
The ghost bikes are memorials to cyclists who have died in road accidents. Protestors say they serve as a reminder that removing bike lanes will lead to more cyclist deaths on Toronto streets.
“We're bringing these bikes to [Queen’s Park] as a symbol of what's to come when they remove bike lanes. There will be death, there will be injury, there will be grieving families,” said Dave Shellnut, one of the protest organizers and the founder of The Biking Lawyer LLP.
The ghost bikes were held aloft by organizers outside the provincial legislature as protestors observed a moment of silence for the dead.
One of the ghost bikes was a children’s bike, representing a 13-year-old girl from Ajax who died after she was struck by an SUV while cycling. The other ghost bike represented the death of a 47-year-old woman from Kingston who was struck by a pick-up truck while riding an e-bike.
The protestors gathered on Bloor Street before taking to the road to the sounds of tinkling bike bells.
Protestors did not cycle down the Bloor Street bike lane — instead opting to take the full vehicle lane — and they occasionally clashed with motorists during the ride.
The Bloor Street bike lane is one of three bike lanes set to be removed under Bill 212, which would require municipalities to obtain approval from the province to build new bike lanes that eliminate a lane of vehicle traffic.
Bike lanes along University Avenue and Yonge Street have also been singled out by the province for removal under an amendment to the bill.
Faraz Gholizadeh, who lives near Parkside Drive, attended the protest with his wife and two children, a five-year-old son and 13-year old daughter. He told TorontoToday his kids use the Bloor Street bike lane to get to school. If the bike lane is removed, he said he would discourage his kids from cycling.
“That'll spell the end of them cycling to school because it's just too dangerous; too unsafe,” he said.
City Coun. Dianne Saxe also participated in the protest and condemned Ontario Premier Doug Ford for “sticking his foot in where it doesn't belong.”
“What Doug Ford is doing is terrible for the city. It's terrible for affordability, it's terrible for safety, and it's terrible for life,” Saxe said. “These are city roads that we pay for, that we maintain and it's our responsibility to manage them.”
Saxe is an avid cycler and she said that on Wednesday night, the day before the protest, a motorist nearly hit her while she was cycling on Avenue Road.
“What [Ford] is doing is going to kill people,” she said. “He knows people are going to die.”
Saxe noted the Progressive Conservatives added a last-minute amendment to Bill 212 that could potentially block lawsuits if cyclists are injured or killed after protected lanes are removed.
As demonstrators rode through intersections, they ignored red lights to keep the procession together, leading to one particularly heated exchange between protestors and motorists outside Robarts Library.
Cars blared their horns at the protestors, with one motorist yelling: “I support you! I’m liberal. I just want to f—king go home!”
One protestor shouted back to the driver that motorists could expect this every day if bike lanes are ripped out. Another protestor swore at the driver as they rode by. It took several minutes for the entire procession of bikes to make it through the intersection.
After protestors gathered at Queen’s Park, they headed to an adjacent sidewalk and chained the ghost bikes to street posts.
Geoffrey Bercarich, a coordinator of Advocacy for Respect of Cyclists (ARC), the main organizer of the demonstration, told TorontoToday the ghost bikes have a better chance of staying up on city property. If the group left the ghost bikes on Queen’s Park property, they would be removed “immediately,” he said.
Bercarich said ARC sourced used bikes for the ghost bike memorials and then he painted them white himself.
He’s been creating ghost bikes since 2003. The years of counting cyclist deaths have taken a toll on him, he said.
For Bercarich, it doesn’t matter who the cyclist was.
“A loss of life happened and I will be there to commemorate that life,” he said.
ARC maintains a map of all the ghost bike memorials placed on Toronto’s streets since the 1980s, though many of the memorials have since been taken down.
