BAY STREET PARKING

TL;DR: The On-Street parking makes turning and driving on Bay incredibly dangerous and it needs to be removed

I recently started driving in the area, and I keep running into the same dangerous situations:

1. Turning left onto Bay is difficult. Half the time an SUV or pickup is parked right where I need to see, and I'm pulling into the intersection essentially blind.

2. To see well enough to turn, I end up creeping into the crosswalk, which blocks pedestrians and forces them out into the street to get around me. Nobody wins.

3. Driving up Bay is a constant scramble. Cars in the right lane have to merge left out of nowhere to get around the parked vehicles, and everyone behind them has to react.

4. Cyclists are forced to swerve into moving traffic to dodge the parked cars, and that's an accident waiting to happen. Many of them just opt to ride in the left lane instead, which makes traversing Bay incredibly slow.

5. When an emergency vehicle comes up behind me, there is nowhere to go. The right lane is full of parked cars, so my only option is to pull into oncoming traffic. That should not be the choice a driver has to make.

Here's what gets me: this is maybe a dozen parking spaces, and they're causing daily risk to the thousands of people who drive, bike, and walk through this stretch. It's not as if there's no alternative either, there's a parking garage just five minutes away at Wellesley and Yonge. The trade-off makes no sense. Please remove the on-street parking along this section. I'm convinced almost no one will miss those spots, and the safety payoff would be immediate. To be honest, the entire Northbound lane of Bay Street between College and Bloor suffers the same problem, but this is the intersection/stretch that I believe needs improvement the fastest.