A fight over Bike Lanes
An article from The Overhead Wire [May 12th, 2026] gets my interest [Rick Bell, Alberta to bring in law to rip out bike lanes and stop new ones, Calgary Herald, May 07, 2026]:
This new law will crack down on those separated bike lanes, or cycle tracks as they are called, popping up here, there and everywhere with little to no concern for the effects of taking away driving lanes and parking lanes. The law will go further and is expected to deal with existing bike lanes as well as city hall plans for future bike lanes.
Fight back against those lanes! They are taking away peoples homes, neighborhoods and parks! Oh, wait a minute, that was highways. Now comes a little striping or pavement conversion to bike lanes and a provincial government reacts against this outrageous taking of urban space for automobiles! And it is all legal [Lloyd Alter, Quelle surprise: Court says Doug Ford can rip out Toronto bike lanes, Carbon Upfront!, Aug 17, 2026 ]:
I was not surprised when the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned Justice Paul Schabas’ finding that Doug Ford’s removal of bike lanes was unconstitutional under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Schabas had concluded that removing the bike lanes “deprived bicyclists not only of security of the person but also of the right to life itself, and it did so in a manner that violated the principles of fundamental justice.” But the appeals court doesn’t concern itself with such trivial things. The constitution says that if the Province wants roads that kill its citizens, that is its right.
In the US this kind of action might be compared to outlawing rainbow crosswalks, or any treatment that might distract(?) drivers. But after all crosswalks and traffic signals only mark the end of the freedom of street right of way pedestrians once had.
Limits to Mobility (LTM) takes an ecological-dynamic perspective. We had an urban form of transit-oriented development (TOD) until North America led in giving that over to auto-oriented sprawl (AOS). That occurred by deliberate—but unaccountable—government actions around 1920. Since then, urban auto traffic is “just what people want” excusing government for its actions that mean “it is all we will let you have”.
Do automobiles have a right to the space they took from urban development? Or does it belong to the original users? Unsplash photo by Robert Ruggiero.
Right of Way versus Automobile
A previous article The Right to a Way discussed the difference between the Right to a way by any means of movement and the right-of-way (ROW) that is the publicly secured space for that movement. The ROW has a long history and so is founded in the urban form of human settlement and ancient modes of travel (foot, animal, cart). The role of the State (a level of governance) in preserving ancient ROW (e.g., footpaths, village lanes) from encroachment is more recent (but still centuries old) as urban development intensified and industrial development altered ancient agrarian organization. The State establishment of new ROW by eminent domain is even more recent and associated with longer-range mobility (e.g., turnpikes, railroads) and traffic capacity (from Haussmann’s remaking of Paris to urban freeways).
The Right to a way and the ROW are then both caught up in social change and the technology of mobility (the ROW for physical bandwidth connections is a related matter). Limits to Mobility (LTM) delves into the relation of mobility and bandwidth parameters to urban development and the role of the State in that. LTM likes to take the long view of these issues because right now we are all in a dilemma of how personal behavior and State policy confront the complexity of the urban ecology. The State has mostly acted to enhance our greediest behaviors because that concentrates money in those who exploit ecological change (e.g., Drill Baby). Of course we just follow our greed. We lose accountability to ourselves and our communities for choosing what is worthwhile. We make our own Tragedy of the Commons (TOTC) absent government interest in regulation. Put traffic through cities and the State just says Open Wiiide!
The immediate example of bike lanes is particularly confused as the State (Canadian in this case but similarly in the US) giveth ROW and taketh it away. This is an instability of policy that LTM sees as operating at the edge of the contentions in urban complexity. On the one side we have the historic Right to a way of all users of a public ROW. On the other we have the more recent (although now over a century old) technologically-induced greed of auto traffic.
The displacement of other traffic by autos (faster! bigger! more petroleum use!) from the ROW is well told by Peter Norton in Fighting Traffic [2011]. Traffic law is nonetheless conservative in retaining Rights of way. Most auto drivers ignore the law that still gives pedestrians the Right of way in marked and unmarked crosswalks, meaning you can cross a street as continuation of any path along a street. There was a survey of that although now several years old [Pedestrian Laws in the United States, USDOT, Traffic Laws Commentary, Vol. 2, No. 3, October, 1974]. Only when we invented “freeways” on new ROW was there complete disregard for historical users (pedestrians, horses, bicycles) as well as historical urban development for the new ROW.
Any street that just came with a city faces the physical conflict of auto traffic and historical users of the ROW. They just do not fit together. For over a century, as Peter Norton explains, there is a de facto bullying of other modes by fast, heavy, careless automobiles. This was then accompanied by a de jure (legislated) discrimination against other Rights of way, practically bicycles and the pedestrian, although in Amish country we still have autos smashing horse carts. Trolleys are also a case where the auto wanted them off the streets and that is what some governments did (e.g., in DC) even long after the auto destroyed trolley financial viability (all as told in Urban Rail and Troy).
We thus arrive at a case where the State tries to preserve a Right of way that is legal and historical against the automobile assumption of the entire ROW (illegal and ahistorical). That the State flops to the illegal and ahistorical is no surprise when it comes to auto traffic. As a precedent regarding consumptive technologies this predicts how regulation of AI and data centers will go. For that we are just in the 1920’s regarding public concern and government caving-in.
State policy has contradicted the self-organization of urban form since at least 1920. In the US the means of that—by Federally-funded highway projects dragging in all lower jurisdictions—is against the Constitution (see LTM Part II). But that has not bothered our road policy since the early 20th century. The Canadian constitutional case will differ but the common law case for traffic and Right of way is similar.
The case of giving bike lanes protects the Right of way of a vehicle that is also covered by general traffic laws. A bicycle is a legal user of any street ROW, but has to behave well, which is to say follow the laws also applicable to autos, that roundly misbehave. This misbehavior is an issue with current E-bikes and scooters: I have just watched young kids zooming up my one-way street the wrong way. I just barely saved a bicycle coming the wrong way on a one-way street and against the traffic signal.
The bike lane is, IMHO, regulation of traffic to make both bicycles and autos behave by delineating the ROW. But regulation of traffic—of making it behave including by limiting speed—is something the State is increasingly losing interest in. It never faced up to limiting urban traffic volume or speed, which is why we got freeway ROWs plowed through cities.
Movement versus Access
There was a time when the bicycle craze (peaking 1880-1900) both promoted State Good Roads policy and constructed limited access (to bicycle) ROWs. It was also a time when transit-oriented development (TOD) was the urban form, a peak of consistency between travel mode (rail, bicycle, pedestrian) and urban location. That is what State policy shortly destroyed for auto-oriented sprawl (AOS). The current bike lane case is just caught in this long, formal, legally-confused change in the urban access form.
A consistent development of the mode of connection and the places connected was possible in the 19th century for two reasons:
The increasing density of urban settlement made private rail investment profitable.
The Federal government and many territories-to-be-States were still preoccupied with spatial expansion.
In other words finance and urban competition promoted compact and productive urban centers with the rail mode that served that compact growth. That is the evolutionary consistency of TOD. But rail as a capital-intensive plant was unstable in economic fluctuations and the compact urban centers produced a density gradient (meaning decreasing land value with radius) inviting sprawl. In this instability, the Federal/State role was critical or “tipping”. That role was transfer of urban resources to rural roads and then after 1920 into a highway system to compete with rail that tipped the balance to AOS. That is the power of public policy but the State is unaccountable for the effects over time of changing the form (feedbacks) of space consumption.
The lack of accountability even for putting a freeway through a city was documented as “ping-pong planning” [A.Q. Mowbray, Road to Ruin, 1969. Pg. 135]. It means “someone else made me do it” and the loop operates particularly between the several State highway agencies and the Federal funders. Ultimately the legislators and bureaucrats blame “what people want”. When we come down to something like the flip-flop bike lanes we cannot tell whether the official is acting for rational public policy or just some personal pique (which we amply see now in the US presidency). Law? Traditional law has just given way to auto-convenience.
The ideology of this Federal/State disruption of urban development and industrial location was that “infrastructure” was a Federal/State concern, land use was not. Having perturbed the urban economy, government split it into a public domain of movement (the purpose of the traditional ROW) and a private domain of location in the access provided by ROW and where everyone else locates. Fair enough. But this self-organization of the urban form broke down with tripmaking by automobile. Auto traffic is neither location nor ROW but it overpowers both. Public “transit”, when buses displaced trolleys, but still corporately operated limped on to a crisis in 1970 when almost all private bus and rail transit collapsed. Any issue of urban form or modal equity now is still in the backwash of that history.
There are the sporadic attempts to trim the edges of this mess. Transit is grudgingly maintained and the current Federal transport bill shows the grudge and indifference to the sprawl promoted as policy. Within this ripple of any ecological consciousness or modal equity come the “enhancements” (in the language of the 1991 ISTEA legislation) that might be projects for pedestrian and bike ways. A slight poke into the belly of AOS.
In the meantime the expanding belly of America gets interested in “active recreation”. Recently the COVID years seemed to get a lot of people out walking and pedaling. Possibly that exposure explains the blip in traffic deaths for such bold exercisers because the misbehavior of automobiles seems to have increased in that period as well. Which brings us back to the regulation of traffic. That should be about the reduction of total auto traffic and making it behave better. That strategy implies more promotion of the other modes and more traffic enforcement. If anyone is tearing up bike lanes and pedestrian paths that just illustrates how volatile and misguided government policy is.
Bike Lanes?
I used to bike commute in the DC area. I lived 15 miles out from our center of government but near a onetime interurban and rail route that became a bikeway. Pretty much the whole commute on reserved ROW. I also in earlier days tried cycling what seemed to be the rural roads of rapidly-sprawling northern Virginia. I soon felt it too risky to share shoulderless roads with speeding BMWs. As far as trying to ride on the main arterials, it was not so much the heavy traffic speeding by as the speeding and turning traffic buzzing your nose at any intersection. So with heart in mouth you negotiate the streets necessary to get to the bike ROWs. By doing that I could bike-commute from Tysons Corner back to Vienna by a slightly more circuitous route than offered by the (ever expanding) arterial through the (ever expanding) interchange with the Capital Beltway (I-495, No Bikes Allowed!).
If we wind this film back to TOD days, a trolley commute was more likely than bike, using the same ROW as now. But the roads as public ROW were light of traffic and still available to the variety of historical users. The exponential growth of auto traffic would change that. Such exponential growth is possible only if someone keeps removing its limits and that is just what government was doing.
Bicycles were declining just as auto traffic grew, which was pretty much after 1893. The streets were left to pedestrians and autos. But the autos were also taking streets from pedestrians.
The sad and minor case of taking out a painted bikeway is just one small indication of where we are in the century-old onslaught of the AOS. It brings us directly to the matter of law versus official discretion. There are cases where TOD is pursued against the odds. And there are cases (our national policy) where highways and auto traffic know no limits. That is the ecological dilemma LTM is about.
The AOS solved no urban problem and increased congestion (negative spillovers). The hysteresis effect is that it is hard to go the other way. Give back the bicycle and pedestrian Right of way! We see from the Canadian example that claiming a right is now just up to erratic discretion.
The government structure that developed with our urban ecology finds it easier to exploit its base than to maintain it (the problem of decaying infrastructure, perfectly consistent with the second law of thermodynamics). If there is a path back to when TOD worked it is hard compared to the downhill of exploiting the streets we were endowed with. That applies to cities as well as the rest of “nature”. Government is easy to corrupt. Real estate developer as President? Sure, all part of the downhill ride. To get back to something like responsibility to the ecology—not just transactions to convert it to handy cash—is the uphill part of the hysteresis cycle. Holding ourselves on some ecological pinnacle like the TOD was hard. There are too many temptations to exploit what is held in common and that is our TOTC.
I guess you know better than the rest of us how we should live.