Lorne Gunter: Province should stay in its own lane over bike lanes

The Alberta provincial government has launched a web portal to collect public complaints about bike lanes, especially in Calgary and Edmonton. This is in preparation for legislation coming this fall that will limit municipalities’ ability to install new bike lanes. In some cases, it may even require them to rip out existing lanes. I feel [...]

The Alberta provincial government has launched a web portal to collect public complaints about bike lanes, especially in Calgary and Edmonton. This is in preparation for legislation coming this fall that will limit municipalities’ ability to install new bike lanes. In some cases, it may even require them to rip out existing lanes.

I feel strongly that bike lanes are a bad idea more often than not. They are underused for the traffic congestion they cause. They are expensive for taxpayers — upwards of a million dollars a kilometre.

And they destroy neighbourhoods. Residents in the Edmonton neighbourhoods of Dunluce and Grovenor, for instance, have lost their on-street parking so a handful of cyclists a day (maybe three handfuls on peak summer days) have a separate place to ride. Most of the time, Downtown lanes in Edmonton and Calgary are empty despite chocking vehicle traffic and costing millions of dollars.

The busiest bike lanes in either city cater only to a few hundred cyclists a day while thousands of drivers are forced to endure slow-downs and delays. Still, I have trouble with the province intruding on municipal turf to regulate what should clearly be a local matter. If residents don’t like bike lanes, take it up with councillors.

Don’t go running to the province to force a solution. Admittedly, Edmonton and Calgary city council are deaf to concerns about bike lanes. Residents might as well be talking to brick walls.

No matter how agitated taxpaying residents become, council and administration refuse to adjust their plans. (Although Edmonton council did recently relent on stealing on-street parking for a bike lane on a seven-block stretch of lightly trafficked, double-wide residential roadway.) Both cities see bike lanes are integral to their plans for future cities built around transit and “active transportation,” like bicycles.

In Edmonton, in particular, council and the administration are obsessed with bike lanes as the way to make their plans for infill and densification feasible. I once asked an urban planner how the city proposed to make room for all the cars that would be attracted by eight-plexes in the middle of residential streets. His response was that extra parking wouldn’t be needed because residents of the multiplexes would use transit or ride bikes to get around.

That’s how detached from reality advocates for bike lanes in local government are. So would provincial intervention help restore some sanity and balance to the obsession with bike lanes? Undoubtedly.

Yet, just as I would resent Ottawa overstepping its authority to interfere in provincial matters, bike lanes should be left to city councils, not the province. If residents don’t like bike lanes (and I sense most do not), elect new councillors. There’s also the little matter that a similar law passed by Ontario’s government in 2024, which limited bike lanes in the province’s cities and even named lanes that had to be removed in Toronto, was overturned by an Ontario Superior Court judge in 2025.

Unbelievably, the judge ruled there is a Charter right to protected bike lanes. His decision is under appeal. But let’s get back to the province’s portal for collecting public comments on bike lanes.

Let’s hope the bike portal was not designed by the same software geniuses who designed the province’s disastrously flawed portal for applying for the Alberta Energy Rebate. The most recent numbers show that only about 10 per cent of Alberta drivers have been able to successfully apply for their $100 payment from the province. Funny, 100 per cent of them had to pay the higher gasoline taxes the province was charging this past spring.

Still, it’s possible well under half will eventually get even the pitiful $100 relief. If the bike-lane portal is as well designed, the province will probably learn that 35 per cent of Albertans are opposed to bike lanes on the moon. You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber.

Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Edmonton