Canada

You can achieve grid lock without a vehicle in the intersection. It’s about volume and red light patterns in a grid. All you need is a choke point. For vehicles, you can achieve this via badly timed traffic lights a freeway entrance, an improperly sized roundabout, or (as you said) an obstruction in the intersection.

My estimation of bicycles to cars is very roughly based on the width of an average car. If everyone obeys traffic lights and there is a choke point somewhere, it is plausible to create grid lock with enough volume. With the current car lane sizes you have to throw out my 4 bikes/car estimation if you want more precision because the stopped space is way more dense. Probably like 8-10 bikes per vehicle. And also, you need an undersized bike path (say across a river during rush hour) that everyone’s trying to get through. It’s hard to imagine because with just bicycles, even if everyone and their mother had a bicycle, we wouldn’t even be close to the volume required on our current sized roads.

Sorry, I enjoy playing games that improve traffic patterns and people maybe misunderstood my post. Bikes can cause gridlock - with an absurdly stupid amount of bikes.

And the government is wrong here. Unless you can create an arbitrarily large amount of lanes, you aren’t going to solve traffic with more lanes. People will realize that traffic is lighter, take that road, and become more traffic until it’s slowed down again.

Sure, downsizing a main thoroughfare might cause longer wait times. But people will find alternatives (underground, walking, biking, etc). The Ontario government is making that statement because they are prioritizing cars and not transportation.

Taking lanes away from cars is stupid if you don’t supply an alternative. And bike lanes (I don’t bike so I would prefer a subway but it’s fine) IS an alternative. So the Ontario government just doesn’t understand traffic.

I love driving but I don’t want to daily commute in my car. It’s just such a waste of space, time, and money.

TLDR: bikes can cause and do contribute to gridlock, but not substantially. The government needs to encourage alternatives to car commuting. Biking is one of them.

Edit: I realized I wrote a story just to defend that bikes can cause and do contribute to gridlock even thought we need a lot more bikes to make a meaningful contribution to gridlock