Bradford says Bloor West businesses watched sales fall. Nobody measured it.

The City monitored this street for two years and never counted a dollar

Toronto has been measuring the Bloor Street West Complete Street Extension since before it was built. The Interim Condition Data Update published in July 2024 is still the only monitoring document on the project page, which was last modified on 27 July 2026. It reports vehicle travel times, vehicle speeds, bicycle volumes, emergency response times for Fire and Paramedic Services, and the number of CaféTO patios installed.

It contains no business, sales, retail or vacancy figure of any kind.

That is checkable in the most direct way available: open the document.

Nothing in the council record fills the gap either. City Council directed staff in June 2024, through item 2024.IE14.3, to keep monitoring the project’s “operational performance”: traffic flow, safety, signal timing. Sales were left out of the instruction, and no report on them has followed.

So when Bradford says businesses “watched their sales fall,” he is describing an outcome the City did not track, on a street where nobody published a before-and-after number in either direction.

More than 40 businesses on that stretch are suing the City over it

This is the strongest version of his case, and it should be put at full strength.

More than 40 Etobicoke businesses have sued the City of Toronto for $10 million, alleging negligence and nuisance over the five-kilometre bike lane running from Bloor West Village into The Kingsway. Merchants on that stretch organised against the lanes and have been consistent and public about it since installation.

Their belief is documented, and nothing here suggests it is manufactured.

A statement of claim sets out what businesses say happened to them. It records an allegation of harm. It does not establish that sales fell, and it will not until the case is tried.

In Bloor West Village itself, merchants overestimated how many customers drive

The one time anyone studied this specific neighbourhood, the premise turned out weaker than expected.

In 2009 the Clean Air Partnership surveyed 96 merchants and 510 visitors in Bloor West Village, testing the assumption that removing on-street parking harms trade:

• Four out of five people surveyed did not usually drive to the area.
• Merchants overestimated the share of customers arriving by car. Even so, more than half of them expected that cutting on-street parking by 50% for a bike lane or wider sidewalks would increase or not change their daily customer numbers.
• People arriving by transit, foot or bicycle visited more often and reported spending more than those who drove.
• 58% preferred the space reallocated to wider sidewalks or a bike lane, even with parking cut in half.

The limit on this matters and we are not going to overstate it. The study was conducted before any lanes existed there, so it measures expectations and travel habits rather than what later happened to receipts. It tests the assumption underneath Bradford’s claim. In the neighbourhood he is talking about, that assumption did not hold up.

The study that measured Bloor after installation refused to take credit for the result

The strongest Toronto evidence is TCAT’s economic impact study of the Bloor Annex and Korea Town lanes: 3,005 visitor surveys, 525 merchant surveys and 15 bicycle counts across fall 2015, fall 2016 and spring 2017, with Danforth Avenue used as a control street that had no bike lane. It was published in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 2019.

Its conclusion is worth quoting in full, caveat included:

Overall, these four indicators point to increased economic activity on Bloor Street. Most merchants reported a higher number of customers than before the bike lane’s installation, visitors gave higher estimates of spending and visit frequency, and vacancy rates were stable.

However, these four indicators also showed similar growth on Danforth Avenue, so the positive outcomes may be attributable to other factors, and not the bike lane. Nevertheless, these early indicators point to a positive, or at least neutral, economic impact of the bike lane.

The researchers declined to claim the lane caused the growth, because the street without a lane grew too. What the study establishes is the range of measured outcomes: positive, or neutral. A decline was never among them.

That was the Annex, and it cannot be transplanted to Etobicoke. It shows what turns up when somebody measures. It proves nothing about a street where nobody did.

Twenty-three North American studies found the same, with one exception

Beyond Toronto, the question has been reviewed systematically. Volker and Handy, writing in Transport Reviews in 2021, examined 23 studies from the United States and Canada:

creating or improving active travel facilities generally has positive or non-significant economic impacts on retail and food service businesses abutting or within a short distance of the facilities … The results are similar regardless of whether vehicular parking or travel lanes are removed or reduced to make room for the active travel facilities.

The same review names a real exception, and it is the best argument available to the merchants suing the City: bicycle facilities “might have negative economic effects on auto-centric businesses.” A shop whose customers arrive by car, from a distance, and leave with something bulky is a documented special case that the literature takes seriously. Whether the businesses on this stretch fit that description is, again, something nobody has measured.

A fall in sales is the one outcome nobody has recorded

Put together: the City tracked this corridor for two years without publishing a business figure. The only study of Bloor West Village found merchants overestimating their driving customers. The only post-installation study of a Bloor bike lane found positive or neutral effects and would not attribute even those to the lane. A review of 23 North American studies found the same, with a carve-out for car-dependent retail.

And more than 40 businesses on the affected stretch say they were harmed, in a claim that has not yet been tested.

Bradford states as settled fact something that sits in the gap between those two things. Nobody has disproved it, because no Etobicoke sales data exists to disprove it, which is the whole problem. It is unsubstantiated.

One note on scope

This post makes several distinct claims and we have rated only one of them. His statement about the Court of Appeal is accurate: the court held on 14 August 2026 that there is no Charter right to bicycle lanes, and that judgments about whether they are wise policy are “no business of the courts.” His description of the existing lanes as “a painted line on an arterial road” is wrong. They are physically separated cycle tracks with precast curb barriers, as the City’s own drawings and his own campaign photograph both show.