How one km of bike lane sparked a revolution in Vancouver

VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 8, 2013/ Troy Media/ - As anybody who has seen astronaut Chris Hadfield's incredible images from space can attest, the single most prominent human-made features of cities like Toronto, Windsor or Edmonton are roads.

Ever since the 1950s the car has been the accidental architect of our cities. Billions of dollars have been dedicated to roads, overpasses, tunnels and other car infrastructure.

But this single-minded dedication to making sure cars got to where they wanted to go as fast as they could has had some pretty serious unintended consequences.

As Andrew Coyne says in Macleans "Traffic is slowly strangling our cities." Cars in traffic use more fuel, pollute more and simply aren't productive. Coyne also quotes a German study which finds that "being in heavy traffic triples your risk of a heart attack within an hour."

Enter the bicycle. It is the most efficient form of transportation on the planet. You can move five times faster than walking and go three times as far on the same amount of caloric energy.

The benefits of the bicycle certainly were not lost on the City of Vancouver when it decided to flip the traditional urban script.

"Since 1997 we established priorities with walking being the highest priority, cycling second, transit third, and the automobile is at the bottom of the list," says Jerry Dobrovolny, the director of transportation with the City of Vancouver.

And unlike cities that dabble in making their cities more bike-friendly Vancouver has actually dramatically increased the use of bikes and decreased traffic congestion in downtown Vancouver.

According to Dobrovolny, bike trips have gone up by 180 per cent over the past 15 years and the amount of people cycling to work has grown from 3.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent.

Today, 12 out of every 100 trips in Vancouver are done via bicycle.

And they did it not by focusing on the middle-aged-man-in-lycra (MAMIL) but by building bike infrastructure that kids, grandmas and people that aren't super proficient bike riders would feel comfortable using.

"We know that there's many people that are interested in cycling, but they're not comfortable riding next to cars," says Dobrovolny.

Nearly all cities have bike lanes, but paint on the road just isn't safe enough for these non-MAMILs. Instead, Vancouver is using separated bike lanes and bike boulevards.

Separated bike lanes are dedicated lanes built only for cyclists that are physically separated from cars. Bike boulevards are repurposed residential streets that have been made bike friendly. "It's a regular street, but it's been designed so that bikes generally have the right of way," says Erin O'Melinn, the executive director of Hub, Vancouver's largest cycling advocacy organization.

Separated bike lanes are the real game changer. On the Dunsmuir Viaduct four times more cyclists are using the road thanks to the separated bike lane. Safety has improved as well.

"Since the separated lanes have gone in downtown we've seen a big reduction in the number of collisions of all types, including the number of people riding on sidewalks, so pedestrians feel much more comfortable," says O'Melinn.

Reducing pollution and improving health are great reasons to invest in cycling, but another reason is that it's cheap like borscht.

"Whereas heavy trucks and buses and automobiles break down the road infrastructure and result in a lot of added costs in terms of maintenance. When we build a pedestrian or bike facility they last for 100 years," says Dobrovolny.

In 2010, Vancouver's city council approved a $25 million 10-year bike plan. For comparison, the Canada Line, the new rapid transit line from Vancouver to Richmond that was built in time for the Olympics, cost $2 billion dollars.

Heather Deal is a Vancouver city councilor who says the decision to convert a whole lane of traffic on the Burrard Bridge into a bike lane was a real turning point.

"That was the first time we took space away from cars. I was assigned the media, I thought this is the last time I'll ever get elected because I'm going down over one kilometre of one lane for traffic," says Deal.

"We cut that ribbon and we cycled across that closed lane and nothing happened. There was no traffic backup. There was no Armageddon. Chaos did not ensue. The city survived and so did we. We went on to get reelected and build more bike lanes after the next election."

http://www.troymedia.com/2013/02/08/how-one-km-of-bike-lane-sparked-a-revolu tion-in-vancouver/

Thanks

Dave

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