Devin Dreeshen wants to hear from you.
Not about whether bike lanes work, but about whether they bother you.
The province’s new Alberta Bike Lane Portal asks Albertans to report a lane if it’s creating congestion, slowing emergency response, hurting a business, inconveniencing a senior, or raising a safety concern. Fill out the form. Together, the minister says, we’ll put Albertans first.
Here is what the form will not tell you: nearly every one of those concerns has already been studied. Not speculated about, but measured, in cities with real streets and real ambulances and real cash registers. The measurements almost all point the other way.
So, let’s take the portal’s concerns in order, the ones you can actually put a number to, and check them against the data the portal would rather you didn’t have. The fifth, “inconveniencing seniors,” turns out to be an accessibility question the safety evidence answers directly. More on that below.
Congestion
The intuition is obvious. Take a lane away from cars, give it to bikes, and the cars that remain have less room. More cars, fewer roads, more congestion. It feels like simple math.
It isn’t. Research from cities around the world shows bike lanes are not behind the congestion drivers feel. The thing the intuition misses has a name: Induced demand. It’s one of the most settled findings in transportation. Add car lanes, and you don’t relieve congestion; you invite more driving until the road fills up again. The reverse also holds: Give people a safe way not to be in a car, and some of them take it. That’s a car removed from the lane next to you.
The numbers are not subtle. In New York, after bike lanes went in on a midtown thoroughfare, the average time for a car to drive it fell from four and a half minutes to three. That’s a 35 percent improvement, helped by a dedicated left-turn lane that stopped turning cars from holding everyone up.1 Below 60th Street, where the city added bike lanes and pedestrian space across five avenues, taxi GPS data showed average car speeds actually rose about seven percent.2 Other before-and-after studies land in the same place: no measurable impact, or delays measured in seconds to just over a minute.3 That is not congestion. That is a rounding error.
Emergency response
This is the claim that gets deployed when the others aren’t landing, because it’s the one that sounds like a matter of life and death. It’s also the one where the evidence most cleanly contradicts the fear.
A peer-reviewed study out of the University of Iowa examined actual fire-department response data before and after four-to-three lane conversions in Cedar Rapids, the same road diets that make room for bike lanes, and found no measurable difference in response times.4 The revealing part is the gap between feeling and fact: A large share of the emergency responders surveyed believed the conversions had slowed them down, yet the response data showed no such thing.
When the researchers traced that perception, it led not to the road design but to drivers being confused about where to pull over to yield, which is a fixable education problem. It’s not a reason to keep the extra car lane.
There’s a mechanism anyone who’s watched a firetruck stuck in gridlock already understands. The streets that trap emergency vehicles are the ones where every inch is occupied by cars, because there’s nowhere for anyone to pull over. A bike lane, or the centre turn lane, a road diet adds, is open space — the exact clear channel a responder needs to get around stopped traffic.
The lane doesn’t block the ambulance. Often, the lane is how the ambulance gets through.
Impact on local business
Merchants believe bike lanes will cost them customers, and they believe it sincerely. They are also, as a group, reliably wrong about it, and we know why.
Portland State University ran the definitive study: 14 commercial corridors across six cities, and bike improvements produced either positive or statistically insignificant effects on sales and employment.5 When Minneapolis added lanes on Central Avenue by narrowing the roadway and removing parking, retail employment there grew nearly thirteen percent against about eight, in a comparison area a few blocks away, and food sales jumped more than 50 percent against 22.6
Closer to home, when Toronto put a bike lane on Bloor Street and pulled out 136 parking spots, a before-and-after study found the businesses did as well as or better than a control area, with transaction values rising.9
The error merchants make is about who their customers are and what curb space is worth. Bike parking earns a business roughly three and a half times more revenue per square foot than the same space given to car parking, because you fit far more bikes than cars in it.7 Cyclists aren’t spending less. Studies in Toronto, Portland, and elsewhere find people who arrive by bike spend about as much per month as people who arrive by car: Smaller trips, but more of them.8
Even New York’s own figures for the 9th Avenue protected lane, which the city says lifted local retail sales far above the borough average, point the same way, though the city has been criticized for never releasing the underlying data, so treat that one as suggestive rather than settled.10
One honest caveat, because it’s the kind that makes the rest more credible: Some studies have found cycling facilities can dampen sales for genuinely car-dependent businesses: auto parts shops, gas stations, and big-box home goods.11 If the portal wanted to make that specific case, there’d be something to talk about. It doesn’t. It wants the anecdote, not the exception.
Safety
This one isn’t just unsupported. It’s inverted. Bike lanes exist because putting bikes and cars in the same space is the dangerous option.
When New York City installed protected lanes, injury crashes for all road users — drivers included, not just cyclists — typically fell by 40 to 50 percent, and a study spanning 12 cities found protected bike lanes associated with cutting traffic deaths and serious injuries for everyone on the road by nearly half.12
The reason is speed.
Separated infrastructure calms traffic, and a pedestrian’s odds of surviving a collision drop sharply once impact speeds climb past about 30 kilometres an hour.13
That is also the answer to the portal’s worry about seniors. The people most likely to be walking, most likely to cross slowly, and least likely to survive being hit. Slower, more orderly streets protect them. Deleting a bike lane doesn’t. It just puts the cyclist back into the traffic lane, which is the hazard the lane was built to remove.
The real problem with the portal
Notice what the portal is and isn’t. It isn’t a study. It’s a complaint box.
A complaint box returns complaints, no matter what the underlying reality is. Stand up a form asking whether something bothers you, and you will collect a pile of yeses, which the province can then hold up as a mandate. The volume was never in question. That’s the design.
A government that actually wanted to know would publish the before-and-after data for the specific Alberta corridors in dispute: travel times, collision counts, ridership, revenue. That data is not exotic. It exists for Toronto, for New York, and for six other American cities. It nearly all points in one direction.
The portal’s move is to ignore the evidence we already have and go fishing for feelings instead — which is the tell. You don’t build a complaint box to find the answer. You build one when you’ve already decided, and you need a crowd.
Every concern the portal names is either contradicted by the evidence or is an argument for building better bike lanes, not for tearing them out.
If Dreeshen genuinely wants to hear from us, that’s the sentence worth submitting.
- Cody Littlefield is a dad and strategic designer based in Crescent Heights, Calgary. Originally from San Diego, California, he spends too much time thinking about how cities are built and whether his kids can safely cross the street.
Sources
1. New York City Department of Transportation travel-time figures, reported in “Do bike lanes really cause more traffic congestion? Here’s what the research says,” CBC News, October 2024.
2. NYC DOT taxi GPS speed data, Manhattan below 60th Street, reported via Streetsblog and Fast Company, 2013.
3. Case-study summary in CBC News (October 2024) and Planetizen, “Over and Over, Studies Show Bike Lanes Don’t Cause Congestion,” 2024.
4. Corcoran et al., “Impact of 4-to-3 lane conversions on emergency response,” Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2024 (University of Iowa; Iowa DOT / CDC-funded).
5. National Street Improvements Study, Portland State University (TREC) with PeopleForBikes and Bennett Midland, 2020.
6. Same study — Central Avenue, Minneapolis corridor results, as reported by PSU/TREC.
7. Transportation Alternatives, “The Power of Bicycle Parking” (bicycle parking generates roughly 3.6x the expenditure per unit area of car parking).
8. Clifton et al., “Consumer Behavior and Travel Mode Choices,” 2012.
9. Bloor Street bike lane before-and-after business study, Toronto (summarized in GovFacts, 2026).
10. NYC DOT, “Measuring the Street: New Metrics for 21st Century Streets,” 2012. Note: DOT declined repeated requests to release the underlying data (Marketplace, 2013) — cited here as suggestive, not definitive.
11. Review literature on street improvements and auto-oriented businesses (San Francisco corridors).
12. NYC DOT injury data and a multi-city analysis of protected bike lanes (summarized in GovFacts, 2026).
13. Established road-safety research on pedestrian fatality risk as a function of vehicle impact speed.
