Admitting on Tuesday that he “got this one wrong” when he was one of 21 city councillors who voted in favour of adding bike lanes along a stretch of Bloor Street West in Etobicoke, mayoral candidate Brad Bradford is now vowing to remove them if he’s voted in as mayor when Torontonians head to the polls in October.Back in 2023, Bradford voted in favour of adding a 5.7 kilometre stretch of bike lanes on Bloor between Runnymede Road and Resurrection Road, saying the plan looked good “on paper” but was a disaster in reality.“These bike lanes in particular are not working,” he said, stressing that local business owners have suffered because of their presence and are now suing the city in a bid to recoup their losses.“Sales are down, traffic and congestion is up,” Bradford said on Tuesday. “And more than 40 business owners, your neighbours, the people who sponsor the Little League softball teams, the folks who hire your high school-aged kids in the summer, they felt so ignored that they are now suing their own city. Think about that for a second, they are suing the City of Toronto. That should never happen. But that’s what happens when you take 50 per cent of the road capacity and allocate it to 0.005 per cent of the road users, it doesn’t make any sense.”Bradford was referring to a lawsuit filed in Ontario Superior Court last February by a band of Etobicoke business owners who are seeking $10 million from the city for “negligence and nuisance” related to the bike lanes and their impact.“Let me be crystal clear,” Bradford said. “When I’m the mayor of Toronto, the bike lanes on Bloor Street West … they’re coming out, and the vehicle lanes are going back in.”In a release on his website, Bradford said the removal plans “would be paired with a plan to redirect the city’s cycling investment into a network of residential streets and multi-use trails in parks, hydro corridors and ravines.”His plan would include completing the “trail and connector projects that have languished in municipal plans for fifteen years, including the 81-kilometre Loop Trail and the Meadoway in Scarborough.”“City Hall needs to have the humility to acknowledge when something isn’t working, and to go back and fix it. These bike lanes in Etobicoke aren’t working,” he added.Related:‘It’s a win-win’: How Toronto is planning 20km of new bike lanes without defying FordToronto cyclists set to defend bike lane challenge before Ontario’s top courtEmergency response times up after Bloor West bike lane installation: community groupLatest poll shows Bradford leading Chow in EtobicokeA Liaison Strategies Toronto Pulse survey released late last month shows Olivia Chow with an 8‑point advantage over Bradford in the mayor’s race, but Bradford holds a significant lead (54 per cent) over Chow (35 per cent) in Etobicoke where the bike lane issue continues to brew. The poll, conducted between July 24–26 among 1,000 Toronto residents, has Chow at 49 per cent among decided and leaning voters and Bradford at 41 per cent. Other candidates garner 10 per cent of the vote. Those numbers mirror Liaison’s early‑July findings, where Chow also sat at 49 per cent and Bradford at 40 per cent.With files from Lucas Casaletto