David Godin sends in some recent shots on his eastern travels:
I’ve attached a photo to this email that I took from the Central Valley Greenway on Sunday:
It shows the demolition of a section of Highway One in Vancouver immediately below the Millennium SkyTrain line and just before the highway bridges the railway tracks and enters Burnaby. I suspect that this may be a once-in-a-lifetime sight in Vancouver, unless the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts are brought down one day …
I have also attached a photo of a section of painted bike lane in Burnaby that is part of the Central Valley Greenway:
The intersection is Still Creek Avenue and Douglas Road and it features what is without a doubt the narrowest painted bicycle lane I have come across in my travels throughout our city. It is so narrow that the North American-standard bicycle painting stencil does not even fit between the lines. What is even more bizarre is that the lane seems to have been recently re-painted to be even more narrow.
It’s still a step in the right direction versus not having any bicycle lanes at all, but surely with the Central Valley Greenway aspiring to be the flagship regional cycling route the City of Burnaby could have ensured its share of the bicycle infrastructure meets some sort of minimum lane width standard.
Plus the signage is terrible. My friend and I, who are both experienced daily commuter cyclists, managed to lose our way twice in Burnaby due to poor, inconsistent, or ambiguous signage …
hi gordon,
any chance to see the first photo referred to in your friend’s e-mail?
Going to have to disagree – their disregard for providing adequate bicycle facilities (and really, this is negligent) is pretty clear when you look at the “before” via Streetsview and see that they didn’t bother to move the centreline (use the pavement patch as a guide).
http://bit.ly/pFEQUh
Even if this is due to truck turning radii (a cop out), all it would take is to move the left turn lane stop bar back. I appreciate that they’re trying to direct cyclists to the left side of a reasonably sharable right turn lane, but the appropriate tool to do that lazily is a sharrow.
/traffic engineer mode
The CVG is on the cusp of greatness, but this section of Still Creek road is a big problem because it scares off many potential users, especially families. I dream of Burnaby getting serious and somehow making the trail beside Still Creek to the right (south) side of the buildings on the photo. I know that would be very hard as many of the buildings go within 4 meters of the creek and it’s pretty swampy (I’ve looked – see for example the end of the parking lot where Metal Supermarket is). Maybe you could cross to the south side of Still Creek and make the trail there for that few hundred meters.
Another thing I wish would happen is to build a proper multiuse trail on the north edge of Burnaby Lake Park, or even on the railway right of way just north of that. The western two thirds of the park already has a road size trail in place, so you’d just have to do something in the area just east and west of the park office. I’ve ridden it when me and my six year old did the Science World to Coquitlam Ikea ride last year. We went through the park on the basis that with a child it was the only safe option, but I’d love to see it made legal. Staying close to the lake is also much flatter.
Gordon are you aware of any further development efforts by Burnaby or are there people that concerned citizens such as myself should write to?
Robin
I have to agree with Robin about Burnaby Lake Park, seems like it would be relatively easy to have a multi-use trail through the northern part of Burnaby Lake park, and that it’s really only the eastern part of the park where improvements would be needed. The only explanation I heard for why bikes aren’t allowed is that the sightlines aren’t good enough, but if bikes and pedestrians can co-exist (as they do) in Burnaby Mountain park, surely Burnaby Lake Park isn’t a problem.
One still needs to take sight lines seriously. Many cyclists speed, including myself.