The City of Vancouver's bike infrastructure is decent, although not wonderful. They have a goal of creating an approx. 1km x 1km grid of bike routes, which, at the current rate, they should generally achieve within 5-10 years. The rest of the region has significantly worse bike infrastructure, and mode share is much lower. However, it is improving.
Here's a map of the City of Vancouver's bike network:
I live in the upper right corner of the city (several blocks below the "E" in "E 1st Ave"). I work downtown, near the big cluster of bike routes under the "W" in "W Hastings St", which is partially obscured by the bike lane routes. Works out to about 14 km round trip. When I going to university, I bike to the far left of the city, the purple area to the left of Pacific Spirit Regional Park, which works out to about a 30-32 km round trip.
To expand a bit on the legend in the map:
Off Street Pathway generally means the Seawall system, particularly around Coal Harbour/Stanley Park/False Creek, such as in this picture:
Source:
http://www.citevancouver.org/quad/pr...%20Network.pdf
Source:
http://travel.webshots.com/photo/109...15188700BUkAXb
*edit: pic wont link properly. help??*
An improved section recently opened up as park of the Olympic Village at South-East False Creek, but generally it's being growing pretty slowly, due to most of the easy-to-implement routes having already been implemented. There are a few other short off-street pathway sections throughout the city, but they're mainly just short little routes through a park or something. Obviously, things like the seawall around Stanley Park are very popular for recreational biking, but pretty much useless for commuting.
Local Street Bikeway is basically just a side-street that's been designated as a bike route. Usually, they'll have some measures to encourage cycling and discourage vehicles from taking advantage of them. This includes things like signal buttons for major roads located at curb-side (so you don't have to go push the pedestrian one), stop signs generally directed towards cross traffic (so you don't have to slow down/stop every block), random barriers thrown up to force cars in one direction to turn (but allow bikes to travel two ways).
Arterial Bike Lanes are basically painted-on bike lanes on busy streets, similar to what other people have posted. I use these quite a bit when I'm going downtown. They're better than Sharrows (see below), but still have a lot of problems. Taxis/Delivery trucks park in them all the time, which is a pain in the ass. Drivers turning right won't even bother to check if someone is biking to their right, and I've almost been hit several times like this. Buses will also obstruct them when they're at bus stops. The general idea is that they take up the bike lane, and half a travel lane. Bikes are supposed to use the left side of the travel lane that the bus isn't using, and cars are supposed to change lanes to the next lane to the left. The problem is that most cars will only change half-a-lane, so you basically have to merge with traffic, if you dont want to wait for the bus to pull away. Arterial bike lanes will sometimes feature "bike boxes", which allow cyclists to queue jump to the front of the line at a traffic light, so they can get accross the intersection first.
Marked shared lanes is means "sharrows", similar to what Ruckus posted. Frankly, they seem a bit pointless to me; when I ride on streets with them (the one on Pender st, downtown), they really feel no different than riding on a street with nothing at all. I suppose you could argue they remind drivers to watch for bikes, but 99% of the time, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, drivers cant even see them.
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Here's a map of Vancouver's bike commuting mode shares:
Source:
http://www.citevancouver.org/quad/pr...%20Network.pdf
As you can see, cycling is generally must common in the inner areas around downtown. Actually cycling in the core area is pretty low, despite the high residental population. However, walking has a 30-40 percent mode share, which tends to make up for it.
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Also, I thought I'd mention 3 significant cylcing improvements that have happened recently:
1) Carral Street Greenway
This is pretty much the new gold standard for urban bike ways in Vancouver. It's basically a Copenhagen style "cycle-track". It follows Carrall Street, connecting False Creek to Burrard Inlet along the east access to Downtown.
Looks a little desolate in this picture, I know, but it's actually pretty nice:
Source: SFUVancouver
2) Central Valley Greenway
25km Bike route from Science World to New West Quay. It more-or-less follows the route of the Millennium Line SkyTrain, which opened in 2002. It's predominantly off-street, with a couple short local-street bikeway, and arterial road bikeway sections. It also has a very brief section with Sharrows, but it's only temporary until a proper segregated path opens in a couple years.
Source:
http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgur...a%3DG%26um%3D1
3) Burrard Bridge Bike Lanes.
Oh, the drama! You wouldn't believe how much outcry this move generated. Basically, the bridge had 3 lanes in each direction plus a sidewalk/bike path on each side. With both bikes and pedestrians using the paths, it was pretty dangerous, and a lot of cyclists have fallen into traffic. They took out one traffic lane, so cyclists use one traffic lane to go one direction, and the opposite sidewalk to go the other direction. Pedestrians (both directions) use the sidewalk beside the (formerly traffic) bike lane.
Here's a picture:
http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgur...a%3DN%26um%3D1