Time to step beyond the bikes-versus-cars conflict

By Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun columnist

August 6, 2009




We need to move beyond the distraction caused by last week’s Critical Mass ride and take bicycling in Metro Vancouver to the next level.

Although some might see this as boasting, I was one of a small band of cycling activists in the early 1990s who pressed for the City of Vancouver to start using its quiet side streets to create a reasonably safe network of bikeways.

Along with UBC physicist Lorne Whitehead, SFU community planner Mark Roseland, former city councillor Gordon Price and others, we spent years convincing city hall and elite cyclists that would-be cyclists needed more options than pedaling for their lives among cars and trucks on the city’s roaring main streets.

Since then, as a result of the work of hundreds of cyclists, traffic engineers and city hall staff — who have been quietly cooperating behind the scenes rather than engaging in the kind of car-bike conflicts symbolized by the Critical Mass ride — Vancouver now has a couple of hundred kilometers of bikeways.

These modest, low-impact bikeways criss-cross the city’s residential neighbourhoods. Thousands of cyclists use the traffic-calmed bikeways every day, for recreation and to commute. Vancouver’s bikeway network was created with hardly any tax dollars and without causing car and truck owners upset, since no streets were closed or parking removed to make them possible.

The bikeways have been a decent start to retrofitting the City of Vancouver (not necessarily the suburbs) into one of the more bicycle-friendly cities in North America, though that’s not saying much.

We’re not even close to many cities in Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands or East Asia.

The recent experimental dedication of one Burrard Bridge lane to bicycles has animated residents, who are debating it (and last week’s Critical Mass ride) like few other issues before. That’s because the Burrard bike lane experiment marks the possible beginning of the next step in creating a proper infrastructure for Vancouver bicyclists of multiple ages, shapes and sizes.

Another infrastructure proposal that appears to have captured the imagination of a variety of Vancouverites is a dedicated bridge over False Creek for bicycles, pedestrians — and wheelchairs, which always benefit from bicycling improvements.

Some of these changes won’t be as cheap or unobtrusive as the effort throughout the past 15 years to transform Vancouver’s side streets into bikeways.

But I hope such improvements would eventually make it possible for, say, one out of five Metro Vancouver trips to be made by bicycle, rather than the fewer than one out of 20 city trips that are made on two wheels now.

As a topic of so-called conversation, bicycling can divide people, usually unnecessarily.

Contrary to what some critics say, bicyclists don’t want to take over Vancouver and shut down all car traffic. Some of my best friends, as the saying goes, drive cars. So do I.

Serious cyclists want to follow the rules, wear helmets, obey stop signs and be respectful of cars, buses, pedestrians and everyone else. But young and old cyclists need more than a piecemeal infrastructure to truly do so, so that they’re not constantly forced to risk their lives by being suddenly funneled into chaotic traffic situations.

How is this going to happen?

It could mean spending tax dollars on special bike and pedestrian bridges. It could mean rebalancing traffic priorities, such as possibly the loss of some street parking for lanes for bicycles and wheelchairs.

Metro Vancouverites like to think of themselves as “green.”

But if we as a society are to create quieter, cleaner cities that are less dependent on imported energy, we need to be a little more courageous, and willing to learn from much more bike-friendly cities beyond North America. In other words, we need to put our money and willingness to evolve where our ecological mouth is.

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Read Douglas Todd’s blog at www.vancouversun.com/thesearch