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TORONTO — Demonstrators trying for a second day to block roadwork to remove Toronto bike lanes were met by police on Wednesday afternoon, deepening a faceoff between Premier Doug Ford’s government and cycling advocates.
The work comes as the province pressed ahead with its plan to overhaul up to 19 kilometres of the city’s protected bike lane network, starting on the premier’s home turf in Etobicoke. The province has framed it as a traffic relief measure, but critics say it’s an example of provincial overreach that will make streets less safe, and no less congested.
A protest Tuesday night ended peacefully when construction crews were escorted from Bloor Street by police and demonstrators chanted “get home safe” to the workers in trucks carrying stacks of pylons.
But at Wednesday afternoon’s protest, at least one demonstrator in a green bike helmet was led away in handcuffs by two police officers. Nearby, a worker in high-visibility vests took down a bike lane sign.
Police confirmed a 25-year-old demonstrator from Hamilton has been arrested and charged with mischief and obstructing a peace officer.
The work along a roughly one-kilometre stretch of Bloor between Islington Avenue and Royal York Road took place despite efforts by the city to propose alternatives that would keep bike lanes while restoring a lane of traffic, the mayor’s spokesperson has said, a compromise already used further west along Bloor.
In a statement after Tuesday’s protest, Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria said, “make no mistake: these bike lanes are coming out.”
The minister’s spokesperson did not respond to questions Tuesday about the cost of the work, or whether it would keep a bike lane intact.
Michael Longfield, executive director of Cycle Toronto, said in an interview ahead of Wednesday’s demonstration that he expected protests to continue “until further notice.”
“It’s not about addressing traffic congestion and very disappointingly, it seems like rather than, you know, try to find those win-win solutions, they’re just doubling down on spite,” said Longfield, executive director of Cycle Toronto, in an interview earlier Wednesday.
An engineering report commissioned by the province found any congestion benefits from taking out bike lanes would be negligible or short-lived. The same report, surfaced in a court challenge of the plan, found bike lanes were predicted to reduce crashes among all road users by between 35 and 50 per cent.
The latest construction between Islington and Royal York was expected to run through Nov. 17, according to a notice on the city’s website. The work was to take place overnight, the notice suggests, but advocates had caught wind after Tuesday’s protest of plans for the construction crews to return daytime Wednesday.
Cycle Toronto is one of the parties to a constitutional challenge of the province’s bike lane plan. A lower court initially blocked the plan as an unconstitutional safety risk, but the Appeal Court overturned that decision and said the trial judge had overstepped into the legislature’s policy-making and political purview.
The group announced Tuesday it would ask the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Mayor Olivia Chow, who is campaigning for re-election, linked bike lanes to other issues where the province has sought to override the city’s position, including the island airport expansion and the removal of automated speed cameras.
“It’s a gigantic waste of money, and it’s trampling on local democracy. It’s unacceptable and it’s outrageous,” Chow said of the bike lanes plan.
Brad Bradford, her main challenger in the race, has supported removing the Bloor bike lanes in Etobicoke, citing the frustration of some local businesses, but left open the question about what to do with the other targeted lanes.
“The people who live and work there decide, street by street, with their city. Not from a podium, and not from the provincial legislature,” Bradford said in a statement.
The city pegged the cost to remove all targeted bike lanes on Bloor, Yonge Street and University Avenue at $48 million, a figure disputed by the province, which has yet to provide its own. Sarkaria has said earlier work that restored a lane of traffic but kept a bike lane on a stretch of Bloor from Kipling Avenue to Islington would cost $750,000.
Last month, the province put out a bid request to study and design options to restore vehicle traffic on bike lane sections of the affected roads, and said the successful bidder would be expected to look for ways to retain or reconfigure bike lanes, “where they make sense and do not make gridlock worse.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 14, 2026.
Jordan Omstead, The Canadian Press
