Vancouver: Big streets, bridges and transit

Just a few more things I want to say about Vancouver before I report on Toronto, where I am now, the second stop on a cross-continent train-and-bike trip. To find out why I’m taking the long way to New York read my first post.

Transit

Vancouver is served by a regional transportation authority called TransLink (just as Portland is served by TriMet). TransLink published the very good bicycling map for the region (very good because it calls out bicyclist-identified low-traffic streets in addition to official bike routes, unlike the Toronto bike map, grrrr; and because it’s a comprehensive street map; and because it uses happy colors, like greens, to show good routes, instead of using red, which is a color Mother Nature generally reserves for violence, poison and death).

All TransLink buses have bike racks on the front, which is great. I took a few. TransLink buses that are not in service read “Sorry…not in service” which is just about the most charming thing I’ve ever seen a bus do, more charming even than kneeling down before me.

Complaints abound, though, that the buses are often very late or very early, and sometimes don’t ever show up. And service to the airport was lousy – after a long wait on a crowded, unshaded sidewalk, it took me three buses to get to my downtown hotel. (I grow ever prouder to live in a city where it’s so easy to get to the airport with a suitcase but without a car. The Portland region is pretty unique in offering a one-seat ride from PDX to downtown Portland and Beaverton – New York doesn’t have that, and San Francisco only recently joined the club.)

Bikes are allowed on the SkyTrain (a monorail that runs out to the burbs) only during off-peak times. I rode to the end of the line and back from 7:00-9:00 pm on Victoria Day, a national holiday, just for fun (yes, I am a transit dork) with my bike. And even on those uncrowded trains, it was still very uncomfortable for me. There is no place to keep a bike besides in the aisle or by the doorway, so I was constantly shuffling it around. And everybody GLARED at me, even when I was just standing on the platform with it. My bike was clearly not welcome. But I was too far away from downtown by the time I got sick of shuffling my bike around and apologizing, so I had to ride all the way home.

No way would I take my bike on SkyTrain if I lived there, except in an emergency. I don’t know what the latent demand for bike/transit access is in Vancouver, but I do know what I can see on the map. About 90% of SkyTrain’s route is paralleled by good bike routes, and a good bit of that is not just nice bike lanes but separated trails and paths, and we certainly can’t say that for MAX in the Portland area.

Bike lockers are available only on one leg of the SkyTrain route; on the other, nothing. But from what I saw, the centers served by SkyTrain, even at the edge, were denser and more walkable than the places at the ends of our MAX line.

Big Streets

I already talked about Vancouver’s trails and bike boulevards, which are my preferred places to bike, but I also spent plenty of time in ordinary bike lanes on ordinary car streets, and it was pretty good.

The big North-South street in Vancouver’s downtown is Burrard Street. I decided to compare it to Portland’s big, downtown, bike-lane-bearing street, SW Broadway. Both are one-way, uphill (though Broadway is steeper), with major office and retail and cultural destinations, with bus traffic, and both connect to a bridge leading out of the central business district. If it was nicer to bike on than SW Broadway, I was going to think about why.

It was nicer to bike on than SW Broadway (I know that’s not saying much). So, why? It has an ordinary bike lane, and the width is consistently more than 5 feet wide (unlike on SW Broadway), but I don’t think that’s the major difference. The major difference might be that most of Burrard St. has transit-only and right-turn lanes to the right of the bike lane, and only some on-street car parking. So the frequency of cars parking and un-parking, double-parking, taxis waiting, loading and unloading, all into or on top of the bike lane, was much lower than on SW Broadway.

Then there was this awesome jug-handle-turn-gizmo:

If you can’t make out the detail, what happens here is that bicyclists wanting to make a left turn off this big street stay to the right, pull into that little bay, push the bike signal button, and get a safe crossing onto the street heading off to the left. How about one of those on SW Broadway?

Burrard Street Bridge

Right now the city government and the bike community in Vancouver are involved in an intense debate over what to do with the Burrard Street bridge.

What’s the problem? It’s not really bike friendly. It’s better than nothing, but bicyclists and pedestrians share one sidewalk. At rush hour it is apparently dangerously jammed, and occasional mishaps have occasionally resulted in someone falling off the sidewalk and getting hit by a fast-moving car.

The city knows it’s a problem, and has been going back and forth between solutions – one financially expensive, the other politically expensive – for years. In 2005, after people objected to widening the bridge to add bicycle and pedestrian capacity in part because it would compromise the art deco design of the span, the council voted to close two of the six vehicle lanes to cars and turn them into giant bikes lanes as an interim experiment. Motorist backlash be damned.

But later that same year, after elections changed the makeup of the city council, they reversed that decision and asked city staff to go back and look again at widening the bridge, which they thought might cost about $13 million. (Coincidentally, the councilor who championed the lane-closure idea is the uncle of a good friend of mine; he didn’t win reelection in 2005, hence the lost vote on the lane closures.)

But the sidewalk-widening plan encountered issues with the Squamish Nation, which owns the reserve just below and outside of the bridge footprint. And now the estimate for the project, in 2009 dollars, has come in at $57 million.

The city is clearly backed into a corner. They have a known safety problem with the existing facilities; an explicit city-wide commitment to improve cycling safety and increase miles of bike lanes; limited space on an old bridge to work with; and motorists with a deep sense of entitlement to the six existing car lanes.

If they do the cheaper (and more progressive) thing and take space away from cars to devote it to pedestrians and bicyclists, that will really be something to watch.