This is great for Toronto, paywalled article tho :(

I hope this kind of implicit legal defense of bicycles as a transportation technology becomes a precedent both in Canada and elsewhere, I actually think the perfect pressure point to hit a lot of car addicted cities with a gargantuan amount of money and inertia behind staying car addicted cities (gestures to basically all of my country the US lol) is in putting the entities that are opposed to more cycling infrastructure in a position where they have to attempt to prove removing bicycle infrastructure will reduce congestion or improve… anything?

I think it leads right into making it very obvious in a legal setting that bicycles are an extremely affordable, low maintenance and already distributed transportation solution and that trying to prove they are a negative to the transportation needs of a city in any quantifiable sense is actually obscenely difficult to do with any intellectually coherent argument backed up by real evidence.

How do you measure the impact of bicycles and bicycle infrastructure on a city? That is something you can think about how to do with a study right?..but how do you measure the negative impact of bicycles on a city? Even trying to design a study is an exercise in pointing out how simply and beneficially bicycles fit into every landscape of human cities. Sure if more people ride bicycles maybe there is a meaningful increase in fairly serious bicycle crash injuries, not trying to diminish that but otherwise…?

It is like trying to prove people wearing hats increases traffic congestion, the very act of trying to design a study around it points out how absurd the premise is.