Brantford City Council voted down a proposed traffic safety plan, which included the installation of bike lanes, for a section of Tollgate road, during its regular Council meeting on Tuesday, November 26, 2024.
On December 11, 2023, Ward 2 Councillors John Sless and Gino Caputo hosted a hybrid public meeting to gather feedback from area residents for City staff to complete a neighbourhood traffic safety review.
The area included Tollgate Road and the north neighbourhood between Paris Road and King George Road.
According to the report from Inderjit Hans, Commissioner of Public Works, with the information received from the meeting, as well as a completed technical review, staff developed a traffic safety plan and presented it to area residents through a Let’s Talk Brantford campaign with the following plans:
“1. Implement “Road Diet” between Paris Road and the bridge over highway 403, consisting of one vehicle lane in each direction, one centre left turn lane, and one bicycle lane in each direction.
2. Install bicycle lane protection in the form of flexible bollards and rubber curbing on both sides of the roadway as identified in the Active Transportation Master Plan (ATMP).
3. Install a type “B” Pedestrian Crossover (PXO) with centre island at Dogwood Drive.
4. Install concrete sidewalk curb and tactile plates to improve pedestrian crossings at the Ewing Drive intersection.
5. Enhance all-way stop control signage and pavement markings at the St. George Street intersection.
6. Install Community Safety Zone signs from Paris Road to St. George Street.
7. Add street to rotation of Digital Speed Signs.
8. Remove the interim Truck Route between Paris Road and King George Road.”
The cost to implement the proposed changes were set to come in around $128,000, and while the Let’s Talk campaign showed that residents were generally accepting of the plan, Caputo and Sless weren’t sold on the bike lanes.
During the Committee of the Whole, Operations meeting held on Tuesday, November 12, 2024, Caputo proposed an amendment to have the bike lanes removed from the plan, noting that he thought the funds could be used in a better way, though it ultimately failed on a vote of 7-4.
When the safety review came back to council for final approval during the November 26 meeting, Caputo said he was still adamant about the fact he did not want bike lanes on Tollgate Road and suggested scrapping the plan altogether.
“I’m to the point where I believe that everything on Tollgate Road should be scrapped and we keep everything as a status quo,” he said.
Noting that he received several phone calls from his constituents following the November 12 meeting, Sless said it was clear that the community didn’t want the bike lanes either.
“I had nine folks on Tollgate that were against this, and one that spoke for it, so it’s very apparent that the community that’s directly involved, wants no part of the bike lanes being put on their street,” said Sless. “It was said to me, and I agree, that’s a main throughfare so when you’ve got one lane going in either direction and you’ve got ambulances and emergency vehicles trying to negotiate that at certain times of the day, they’re not going to get through and it just creates havoc for everyone living there, and I guess for everyone that’s trying to stay safe and allow EMS to get to where they need to get to in a timely manner.”
He then encouraged his fellow councillors to really think about what they were doing and vote against the plan as a whole.
Councillor Richard Carpenter later said that with how busy Tollgate Road gets during school hours, he also believed having single lanes would ultimately create an issue.
“There’s not a lot of traffic on Tollgate Road on a regular basis, but during the hours of school letting in and letting out, Tollgate Road is pretty jam-full,” said Carpenter. “There’s a high school on Paris Road and another high school on Tollgate and I think going down to single lanes here would create a problem in that neighbourhood so I won’t be supporting it.”
Mayor Kevin Davis then said that he would in fact be supporting the proposal and explained why.
“As we plan this city, we have to plan the city in terms of infrastructure for what is needed now and what we think is going to be needed in the future. It’s clear that we have to design our road system for everyone who uses it. There’s no question that most people in our community use cars, but is that always going to be the case as the ownership of a vehicle becomes ever more expensive?” he asked. “For those young families, the young people, and those who are earning minimum wage, many of them can’t even afford transit and they often use bikes. I see them every morning on Glenwood Drive, which runs parallel to Colborne Street East, traveling to their employment in Cainsville.”
He then said that the City is trying to create at least two north-south continuous bike routes, and at least one east-west, so that those who depend on bikes can do so safely.
“And we do have two north-south, we have Wayne Gretzky Parkway and we also, of course, have Memorial Drive and North Park Street, but what we really do not have in our city is a system with a continuous bike lane path that can take people east-west,” said Davis. “Our largest employment area is in the Northwest, and if you talk to the employers in that area, many of their employees ride bikes and so I think it’s important that we have a system that takes care of everybody and provides for at least one east-west route in our system.”
After a few other comments from councillors, the proposed traffic safety plan then failed on a vote of 9-2, with Davis and Councillor Linda Hunt in favour.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
