Adding bike lanes to Burrard Bridge, as contentious as that may be, is only part of the story. Getting to the bridge is as challenging – at least on the north side.
While the striped bike lane on Burrard Street itself is barely adequate, the absence of any room at all for cyclists on Pacific Avenue is unacceptable.
Above is Pacific looking west from Hornby. There are two turn lanes for vehicles heading on to the bridge, and one curb lane for traffic proceeding west. There is no room at all for cyclists. I doubt a vehicle lane could be removed, but the sidewalk could presumably be narrowed for the addition of a bike lane. That requires major reconstruction, particularly to move the pipes underneath.
The same is true for Pacific on the other side of Burrard, where unfortunately the sidewalks are already too narrow. And even moreso on the southeast corner of Pacific and Burrard, where cyclists are coming off a downhill slope.
The City owns the adjacent site, occupied by a restaurant, and so can rebuild the entire intersection. But at some cost.
Nonetheless, it would be pointless to provide lanes on Burrard Bridge without also accommodating cyclists on the approach streets. The cost has to be included in any realistic budget.
Another reason, I think, to consider the option of a separate passerelle.
This is a regular route of mine, so on one level I completely agree with you about the problems with Pacific Ave. Coming from Kits is pretty bad, going back even worse.
I love passarelles but I do worry about “the best being the enemy of the good enough”. If Pacific is too hard/expensive to fix, why not use Drake instead (and in addition remove all parking from Burrard between Pacific and Drake to keep the bike/bus lanes clear.) Drake/Burrard is my preferred way to approach the bridge now, as the Drake traffic is pretty slow moving – but would anyone really miss it if car traffic was limited on Drake – by closing it off to cars at some intersections?
I agree with Mark. When I bike towards downtown over the Burrard bridge I always turn right on Drake and then left again on Hornby (which has a meager bike lane and is a reasonable place to bike on). This only gives me 1 block on Burrard.
On the way back from downtown, I head down Richards (which also has a meager bike lane). Then right on Drake (where I dodge some traffic, but at least it is slow). And then left onto Burrard.
Making Drake more bike friendly, as well as that one block on Burrard would go a long way to encouraging bikers in downtown.
Between Smithe Street and Pacific (Street) there are only two east-west streets that allow westbound travel from Pacific Boulevard – those are Davie and Drake (Helmcken does not reach Pacific Bouelvard and Nelson street runs one way eastbound in the area).
With Davie closed for construction, Drake is a very imprtant street for access into Downtown South. In addition, Davie has a steep hill at Homer Street, and in snowy conditions (such as those we have seen in the past few weeks), Drake provides a gentler slope to access the area.
When the Granville Bridge loops (the cloverleaf ramps) are removed in a few years, expect Davie and Drake to absorb much of the traffic that would have formerly used the loops to access the Granville Street bridge from Pacific Bouelvard, as drivers will distribute through the area.
So your argument against is that there are only two narrow streets left for westbound car traffic, if you don’t count the wide ones?
“but would anyone really miss it if car traffic was limited on Drake”?
Yes.
Note that both Smithe and Pacific Blvd (the big streets) both skirt Downtown South (i.e. say your destination was the VanCity Theatre or Scotiabank Dance Centre). If you force people to access Downtown South using those streets, you would be eliminating the fine grain grid and, in effect, creating a superblock and making the bigger streets even less friendly (whether for pedestrians or bikes) by forcing more and more traffic onto them.
I suppose what’s suggested is a traffic calming measure, like the roadblocks in the West End to prevent Johns from soliciting from Hookers in the 1970s, but it also seems vaguely like an inward-facing suburban neighbourhood bounded by arterial roads designed to keep people out.
Yes, West End style traffic calming is what I was suggesting – it seems to have worked out rather well there, I hope we can agree on that.
Like I said at the outset, I worry about postponing useful measures while we search for perfection. I’d love a seawall-to-seawall passarelle, that would be pretty much my ideal, but I don’t want one at the expense of leaving the current situation in place for the 5 years it would take to get it planned and built. So if we can’t have the best solution, what is the least worst other thing we can do?
I’d be interested to know what you would rather do instead.
I think that the difference in neighbourhoods between the West End (primarily residential) and Downtown South (more of a mix with criss-crossing arterials) would mean that traffic calming would have a different result in Downtown South. The streets are busier in Downtown South than in the West End.
For Drake St., I just say continue sharing the road. It’s not so busy that it’s dangerous to cyclists in its existing form.
WRT the Burrard Bridge, I favour closing one lane to make 2 bike lanes and redistributing the remaining 5 traffic lanes. Building a passarelle, while dedicated for pedestrians and cyclists, suggests that cyslists be “excluded” from Burrard Bridge (i.e. moving the “problem” out of sight out of mind (of drivers)). I think that having people continue to share public facilities (roadways) is a better way to keep each other aware of each other.
Likewise, I didn’t like the City’s proposal for an pedestrian/bike bridge underslung under Burrard Bridge because it included a criss-cross (level intersection) between the bike path and the pedestrian sidewalk at each end and on each side of the bridge. Not only would that mean potential pedestrian and bike collisions, but cyclists rejoining the roadway would be unseen by drivers because they would appear from outside the driver’s field of vision (imagine cyclists rejoining the roadway at the northeast corner of Burrard Bridge with cars turning right onto Pacific, even if the intersection is normalized). A cyclist in an adjacent bike lane over a longer distance is much more visible to a driver and a driver who passes a cyclist in a bike lane will know to watch for the same cyclist if the driver makes a subsequent right turn.