How did a simple strip of asphalt trigger one of Canada’s fiercest suburban-versus-urban culture wars?
In this episode of DemograFix, host Cara Stern sits down with Tom Babin, creator of the urban cycling channel Shifter, to unpack the fierce “bikelash” sweeping Canadian cities. They explore how bike lanes were weaponized into a high-stakes culture war pitting suburban drivers against downtown commuters, why provincial governments are stepping in to override municipal street designs, and why solid transportation data so rarely shifts public perception. From the political friction in amalgamated mega-cities to practical solutions like "road diets" and safety-first messaging, this discussion breaks down what is really driving the fight over who owns the road.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: When looking into generational differences, one of the first things that came across was that younger people are delaying getting their driver’s license compared to previous generations. I find that really interesting, not just because it says something about how differently young people are living their lives, but also because it makes me think about the cost of living. Cars are typically the second biggest expense in household budgets, so for generations struggling with the cost of living, being able to live without a car can make a huge difference.
That raises a bigger question: if fewer young people are driving, are our cities and streets actually adapting to that? Across Canada, street design has become a major political issue, showing up in municipal campaigns and increasingly pitting cities against provinces. At the centre of a lot of those debates is one particularly contentious question: what happens when we take space away from cars and give it to bikes? Today, we’re talking about “bikelash”—the growing backlash against bike infrastructure happening across this country.
Tom Babin runs a YouTube channel called Shifter, which he describes as a channel about urban cycling, bike commuting, and the ways we get around our cities. We’re so grateful that he took the time to join us today. Welcome!
Tom Babin: Thanks for having me.
Cara Stern: Why do bike lanes make such a great wedge issue for politicians?
Tom Babin: Urban cycling has been coded as this urban elite thing. Bike lanes traditionally are in urban areas, but we’re seeing a lot of governments that are voted in by suburban electorates, so it becomes this culture war issue pitting the suburbs against the inner city. Of course, those broad stereotypes don’t apply to most people, but I think that’s why it’s become a good wedge issue. It’s a visual thing: when someone sees an “urban elitist” riding a bike, it’s an easy target to point to.
Cara Stern: I want to go over some of the places fighting about this in Canada. Ontario is probably the biggest example. A law came in stating that new bike lanes cannot take away a lane from cars without approval by the provincial government, and they put through a bill expressing the intent to remove three arterial bike lanes. Alberta seems to be taking inspiration from Ontario, talking about creating similar legislation to put city street design under provincial jurisdiction. They even created a tool where you can report your concerns about bike lanes with a multiple-choice selection on what you don’t like about them—with no option to say “I like them” or “I don’t care.”
Then there’s more: Montreal’s municipal race had a major focus on bike lanes, and in Halifax, the premier threatened to take over city street design just like Ontario if they went ahead with a bike lane plan, causing city council to back away. These are just the big ones, as there are others happening too. What is going on here?
Tom Babin: The one thing I’m fairly confident about is that none of this is based on transportation policy. If you look at what works for moving people around in cities, bike lanes have a lot of evidence in support of them. You actually see this in the original Ontario court case. The judge’s original ruling in favor of blocking the legislation noted that there was so much evidence that bike lanes increased mobility and safety, that they’re good for cities, and that there are no concerns about increasing traffic congestion. On the other side, there was basically no evidence that bike lanes increase traffic congestion, which was the main contention of the Ontario government. The judge was quite scathing, saying there’s so much evidence on one side and no evidence on the other.
Clearly, it’s not being driven by transportation policy; it really is a political issue. My sense is that it’s an easy topic for politicians to go after if they’re counting on a suburban or rural electorate. But if you talk to people in the suburbs, there are a few who really hate bike lanes, while most people just don’t care. We’ve seen this in elections in lots of places where politicians try to make it a big issue, but most voters are thinking, “There are way more important things to worry about here; I don’t know why we’re getting so fixated on this.” It feels less about transportation policy and more about wedge issues and culture wars, which also makes it really difficult to combat.
Cara Stern: You can even look at the States and see Donald Trump talking about bike lanes—it seems to be all over the place. We have all these amalgamated cities, so in order to run in Toronto successfully, you need to appeal to both suburban-minded and downtown-minded people. There is a tension between those two groups. I wonder if this is inevitable when you have these big cities that include suburban areas.
Tom Babin: You’re right about Trump—the Trump administration literally called them “DEI bike lanes.” I think that says everything you need to know about how they’re looking at them: not as transportation policy, but as a culture war. I absolutely think you’re correct about the makeup of the city. If you look at the cities in Canada that have made the most progress in alternative transportation and providing safe places for people on bikes, it’s Montreal, Victoria, and Vancouver. The commonality between them is that they have multiple jurisdictions rather than one single “unicity.”
The places where you are seeing problems and where provincial governments are stepping in are places like Calgary, Edmonton, and Toronto, which have bigger, amalgamated municipalities. In practice, you have people living in inner cities, many of whom don’t own a car because they don’t need one. They understand the value of bike lanes and use them all the time, so they vote for parties that offer different ways of getting around the city. That can bleed out—for example, Victoria has made great progress in the last few years, which has created pressure on outer municipalities to build more bike lanes because commuters see the benefits too.
When you get to those outer rings, people aren’t seeing those benefits as directly. A lot of people out there live with a car because they have to—it’s the only way of getting around. It’s just people living very different lifestyles: car-free versus car-dependent. That’s where the tension comes from, so the makeup of the city is a huge part of this.
Cara Stern: In some of the responses to the recent court case in Ontario, as you mentioned, the court initially said they couldn’t rip out the bike lanes. Then it went to an appeal process, and that court said yes, they can—it doesn’t matter if it’s based on data, it’s provincial jurisdiction. I’ve seen op-eds talking about how if you want change, don’t go to the courts; you should show up to vote.
What I keep wondering is how you do that when people in Toronto did vote for pro-bike-lane candidates, and the policies were passed through city council with staff recommendations. In the last mayoral election, the candidates who ran against bike lanes didn’t win. Even if you look at polling in places like Etobicoke—which probably has the most controversial bike lane—a majority of people don’t want them gone. Most people want them to stay, don’t care, or want to see more bike lanes. Why does this keep coming up if it’s not even a winning policy in cities?
Tom Babin: I think you’re right. The same thing happened in Edmonton: the previous city council was very favourable toward bike lanes and passed a $100 million investment in them, which was pretty controversial in a city like Edmonton. Everyone thought it was going to be a huge election issue, but most of the politicians who were most in favour of bike lanes got re-elected. It’s not a winning strategy there either because, again, for most voters, it’s just not a huge issue—they’re more concerned about jobs, housing, and other important priorities, and they see this as a distraction. For a certain type of politician, it lets them show off their credentials, signal to a specific electorate, and say, “I’m going to score points by dumping on those woke urban bike riders.”
Cara Stern: How did this form of transportation become a left versus right issue? I don’t understand the history of how we got here.
Tom Babin: It’s bizarre to me too, because traditional conservative values like self-reliance, efficient use of taxpayer money, and taking responsibility for your own health fit into cycling so well. I don’t think it’s strictly left versus right as much as urban versus suburban, which is how the vote breaks in a lot of Canadian cities now. Calgary never used to be like that, but as it has grown, more of the city is voting that way, creating an urban-suburban split. That might be the biggest difference in our elections these days across a lot of issues.
Cara Stern: When I hear from people who really don’t like bike lanes, the main thing I hear is, “Nobody uses them, they are empty.” Sometimes the variation I get is that they are only used by delivery drivers and nobody else. We know there is data showing that isn’t true, so why is that perception so prevalent?
Tom Babin: Because they can feel empty. If you don’t live downtown and you only drive in occasionally, bikes are small and don’t take up a lot of space. If you’re not there at rush hour, the lanes look empty. But you could say the same thing about roads—a lot of times they aren’t full either. On my commute here in Calgary, which is mostly on bike lanes and multi-use pathways, there is some traffic, but there’s also not a lot of car traffic on those specific roads because planners chose routes that aren’t the main arterial streets.
The data is clear that bike lanes work, but I have a lot of sympathy for people who struggle with car commutes. A lot of people choose a car because it’s their only option, so if they’re driving downtown, struggling to find expensive parking, or sitting in congestion while looking over at an empty bike lane, I get why that would annoy them. It’s an emotional reaction: “I’m wasting my time on this commute.”
As a cycling community, I think we’ve done a good job of getting the message out to decision-makers and politicians who understand the value of bike lanes, but we’ve done a bad job of winning the hearts and minds of people in the suburbs. In marketing terms, you have to raise awareness before you push people down the funnel to make a purchase. We’ve put all our effort into making the “purchase” without putting time into raising awareness about the value of transit and cycling in those areas.
When I go to public meetings around cycling, even with politicians advocating for transportation alternatives, I’m amazed that many attendees have never thought about cycling as a legitimate mode of transportation. If you’ve never traveled to a city with great cycling infrastructure and you live where a car is necessary for every trip, you’re just not getting it. Long term, we need to do a better job of spreading that message.
We’ve also spent too much time messaging around congestion, street life, and urban vitality, and not enough around safety. I noticed this recently in Seattle, where advocates are very on-message: it is always about safety. A couple of years ago, they passed the “safety stop” law, allowing cyclists to treat stop signs as yields. In other places, that got rejected because people argued, “We should all follow the same rules.” But in Seattle, they focused on evidence showing that allowing cyclists to yield and clear intersections quickly is safer. Keeping people safe on bikes is probably the strongest message we have, and we need to stick to it.
Cara Stern: When you mention safety and winning hearts and minds, I wonder how you do that for people who might never experience cycling as transportation. In Toronto, for instance, the main mayoral opposition candidate suggests putting bike lanes in ravines. That appeals to people who view cycling purely as a recreational activity, where riding through a ravine sounds much nicer than riding on main roads—even though that doesn’t work for most urban commutes. How do you square that?
Tom Babin: A lot of our messaging as cycling advocates focuses too heavily on commuting. There’s a concept called the “mobilities of care”—offering transportation alternatives to get kids to school, go to a soccer game, or take an aging parent to a doctor’s appointment. That is a great use case for alternative transportation, but we put a lot of focus on upper-middle-class professionals getting to their jobs downtown.
If we broaden the scope to include people living in urban areas taking a two-minute bike ride to the grocery store or the pub, that’s a better narrative. The reason people suggest cycling through ravines is because they view it strictly through a commuter lens. If you live in the suburbs, riding through a park sounds great, but it doesn’t help people living in those neighbourhoods who need cycling to get around for everyday life rather than just commuting.
Cara Stern: Critics often argue that the data supporting bike lanes assumes the most optimistic version of reality—like good weather rather than freezing cold or snow. Realistically, most people don’t want to bike in the winter in our current culture. What do you make of the argument that the data is too optimistic by not accounting for seasonality?
Tom Babin: You’re talking to someone who wrote a book about winter cycling! My answer is always to look at the winter data: it mirrors the summer data in that as infrastructure gets more connected, safer, and well-maintained, the number of winter riders climbs at the same rate as summer riders. There’s always a gap—usually, with good infrastructure, about 30% of summer riders will also ride in the winter—but as conditions improve, that number rises. That tells me it’s not just a core group of extreme winter cyclists.
Realistically, it’s harder in the winter because you need proper clothing and preparation, but fewer people walk or use sports fields in the winter, too. That doesn’t mean we don’t build those amenities. Bike lanes are an amenity we build for the summer; if we maintain them in the winter, people will still use them, and ridership will continue to grow.
Cara Stern: In the Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that allowed the provincial legislation to proceed, the judge wrote that “common sense” dictates an additional lane would make traffic faster. That reasoning rings true for a lot of people. You can talk about “induced demand”—the idea that adding a lane attracts more cars until it’s congested again—but the court described that as just a theory. It feels counterintuitive to people to think that taking away a lane won’t increase congestion.
Tom Babin: It makes intuitive sense, and that’s how people make decisions. Induced demand is a counterintuitive notion, so it takes education to understand it. We have to demonstrate it over and over again. There is tons of evidence that it’s real, especially in Toronto.
Cara Stern: We had a perfect real-life example with Highway 407 when the province permanently made a section of the toll road free, and it quickly became as slow as any other highway. I don’t know why it’s so hard to extrapolate from examples like that.
Tom Babin: Long-term education is part of winning hearts and minds—helping people understand that adding “one more lane” isn’t going to fix traffic. The same argument applies to transit. Most people don’t spend their free time thinking about transportation policy; they just want to get home to their families after work, and when they get delayed, they get angry and look for a culprit. They think, “I need one more lane,” or “That bike lane is in my way.” It takes work to help people look deeper at real solutions.
Cara Stern: When provincial governments override cities—which they are legally entitled to do in Canada—it makes it challenging for municipal leaders to push back. It makes you wonder why we vote for city council if their decisions can be overridden, but given that reality, municipal leaders try to find compromises. Is there a way to keep bike lanes without taking away car lanes? Are there specific street designs that accommodate cyclists while preserving space for cars, even on existing road conversions?
Tom Babin: In my more optimistic moments, I think having a second set of eyes on bike lane projects isn’t a terrible idea. Sometimes cities build poor bike lanes, and having a review process to adjust and improve them is great if that’s the genuine motivation. If we can replace a bike lane that isn’t working with one that works better somewhere else, that’s a positive outcome.
In North America, we’re still not great at building bike lanes. I see projects where planners seem to be reinventing the wheel with custom designs from scratch. We had one put in here recently with an unusual intersection design that pops the cyclist up into the pedestrian space to cross in the crosswalk before returning to the street. The first time I used it, pedestrians stopped and wondered what I was doing riding in their space!
We need to get better at concepts like the “road diet.”
Cara Stern: What is a road diet?
Tom Babin: On a four-lane road, you squeeze the existing lanes a little tighter to make room for a bike lane. This works well in North American cities, especially out West, because our road networks are overbuilt with wide lanes. Squeezed lanes have the added benefit of slowing drivers down, which addresses the common neighborhood complaint about speeding.
There was an interesting project in Edmonton involving an overbuilt road from the 1970s where traffic never reached half of its projected volume. The city repurposed that extra space to add a bike lane, green space, and a row of trees. Because there were about ten schools along that stretch, kids could walk and bike to school more safely, and residents felt much more comfortable letting their kids play out front with that added buffer. Even though it was criticized as a “bike lane project,” it delivered broad community benefits.
Cities should be more strategic with holistic planning rather than installing disconnected lanes wherever it’s easiest. If there were a clear 10-year network plan that everyone could debate and then execute, we wouldn’t have to fight over every individual bike lane. When Calgary installed its downtown bike grid, there was initial pushback, but city administrators got creative by reallocating parking into underutilized nooks and crannies, making the cumulative parking loss minimal. Constructive pushback that forces creative thinking isn’t a bad thing; I just wish that was the motivator rather than culture-war politics.
Cara Stern: For anyone interested in learning more about these issues or getting involved, Shifter is a great place to start. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us on The Missing Middle today.
Tom Babin: Thanks for the plug, and thanks for having me on!
Cara Stern: Thank you so much for watching and listening. Our producer is Meredith Martin, and our editor is Sean Foreman. If you have any questions about putting your kids on a bike in winter, check out the Shifter YouTube channel or email us at [email protected]. We’ll see you next time!
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
Ontario just made a ruling that could inform bike lane removal cases across Canada
Removing bike lanes will cost at least $48M: city staff report
Government of Alberta: Report concerns about bike lanes
Edmonton council approves $100M for bike infrastructure across city
Guest Tom Babin’s official urban cycling and commuting YouTube channel
I think some of the culture war aspect is self inflected by the cycling advocacy groups ( I was on them for years) who insist that bike facilities are part of a larger woke war against late stage capitalism and oppression and the patriarchy and of course everyone in favour of bike lanes is voting for the progressive/ndp candidate and must hate DOFO. One agm in my city was almost hijacked by a politician who tried to turn it into a partisan rally. Climate change sanctimony, affordability etc etc cycle lanes were just a tool in the omnicause warfare. It drove people like me out, with our rational voices, ability to see various sides and viewpoints, and middle of the road values. BTW i'm a lifetime car-free household.
North American culture wars really are odd things, but in this particular case I think that the proponents missed the boat on both design and branding of these lanes. In Europe they are not bike lanes, they are mobility lanes: used by bikes, scooters, wheelchairs, etc. This gets e-bikes and e-scooters and mobility scooters where they belong - separate from both pedestrians and cars, and mean that more grannies and kids going to daycare than Lycra wearers use them.