Burrard Bridge bike lanes doomed for failure
By Miro Cernetig , Vancouver Sun columnist
May 6, 2009
COLUMN: It’s pretty much a given that Vancouver’s Burrard Bridge is ground zero in the city’s bicycle wars.
For years, bicyclistas have sought to take over its lanes. Autoistas want to keep the bridge all for themselves.
Now Vancouver’s new, green mayor is poised to enter this silly, polarized battle. But Gregor Robertson may want to think twice before he backs the newest proposal to close one, perhaps two lanes of the landmark bridge to cars.
This $1.45-million experiment is doomed to failure. The introduction of bicycles to the busy bridge has been tried before, in 1996. It was deeply unpopular and a traffic disaster.
There’s absolutely nothing to suggest it will be different this time.
The Burrard Bridge, a key passage into Vancouver’s downtown, still remains packed with fast-moving cars at rush hour. Any reduction in car lanes will create similar traffic jams and play havoc with the city’s traffic flow.
Don’t take my word for it, consider a city report the mayor must surely have read: “Computer modelling done at the time indicated that the reallocation of one or two lanes would interfere with transit service, slowing bus operations in both northbound and southbound directions, as well as adding to traffic congestion in Kitsilano and West End neighbourhoods.”
Mayor Robertson wants to create the greenest city on earth.
Opening the bridge to bicycles is, he says, part of that green dream. But it’s a tenuous argument.
The reality is the Burrard Bridge experiment will have almost no impact on the city’s carbon footprint. His own staff have told me that in private.
This is because reducing car lanes on the bridge will cause gridlock, forcing automobiles and buses to idle, creating more, not less, greenhouse-gas emissions.
Rerouting cars to other roads in and out of downtown Vancouver will also add kilometres to a trip — which means more gas burned.
The other inescapable fact worth noting is there’s also no cycling crisis that needs solving. In fact, bicycling traffic on the Burrard Bridge has actually plateaued, as the city’s own report notes: “Growth of cycling and walking on the Burrard Bridge, which increased 30-40 per cent between 1996 and 2001, appears to have plateaued in recent years.”
What is His Worship’s urgency on this issue, anyway? The city’s cycling study found the use of the bridge by cyclists to be surprisingly modest: “Between 8,000 and 9,000 people cross the Burrard Bridge every hour in peak periods (8 a.m.-9 a.m.) and (5 p.m.-6 p.m.)”
How many of those commuters are actually on two wheels? Let’s look at the report again: “One in ten is walking or cycling.”
That highlights the final absurdity underlying this idea. If the mayor votes on closing lanes of the Burrard Bridge to cars he will in essence be telling us the desires of a few hundred cyclists — and that vociferous bicycling lobby that helped put him in office — are worthy of a $1.45-million expenditure the city’s own planners know is unlikely to be good value.
Is this an anti-bicycling tirade? No.
When the Burrard Bridge is upgraded, as it must be in the years ahead, bicycling lanes must be incorporated into the redesign. Those plans are already drafted.
Until then, put fences up on the curbs to keep cyclists from falling into traffic. And tell them, please, to pedal a little slower on the sidewalks until they get the bridge of their dreams.
We’ll all save about $1.45 million. And it will save the mayor another headache — not having to explain the $250,000 “communications” strategy his bureaucrats want him to spend peddling this clunker of an idea to the public.
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