It may be coincidental, but the Park Board chose to construct an expanded bike-and-blade route through the park at a time when people are expecting change – and the presence of heavy machinery – as a result of the December windstorm.
Still, it’s a shock to see the scale of the new right-of-way:
I confess: this is a project I’ve been pushing for since the late 1990s. I remember taking two groups of Park Board Commissioners on cycle trips through the park, explaining the inadequacies of the existing pathways, most of which were never designed to handle the load, as evident by the wear and tear on the popular routes :
Worse still was the confusion. On some paths, the yellow lines were meant to keep those on wheels to one side:
And on other paths, the markings served as the centre lines:
And they would change suddenly without clear signage – an unpleasant and dangerous experience for everyone.
The Park Commissioners were persuaded of the need for change, and passed the appropriate motions. But these things take money – and time. The City went through a public process that took two years before rebuilding the Seaside Bike Route along English Bay. That too involved laying asphalt across the greensward at certain places, like here at the Kensington Curves (my name, based on the historic apartment building across Beach Avenue):
Still, I have to say, the width of the new lanes by Lost Lagoon are awfully wide:
I’ll wait until they’re finished before final judgment. But it’s generally true that transportation engineers tend to prefer the widest right-of-way they can get, and to design the routes for the fastest user, whether cars or bikes or blades.
Still, after all these years, to have a safe and pleasant route to wheel through the park is a major achievement for the Park Board. And I have no doubt that it will be well used.
That 5th pic is the best marking I’ve seen for the pathways. They need to have better markings all over – esp. on the False Creek seawall, where I suspect that the markings would be considered a blight on the landscape.
One marking that I think they should improve is the pedestrian marking on the seawall. It has no arrows. It should have double ended arrows to match the arrows on the bike markings. It’s not necessarily obvious that a marking without arrows means two ways – I suspect that’ why you often see pedestrians staying to the right side of the path (which is often the bike path) – they don’t know the other side is a two-way path.
BTW – looks like the City engineers proposing the cantilevered Burrard Bridge bike path/sidewalks (10 ft width?) had a hand in that bike path.
Thanks for that.
I just learned yesterday the City of Victoria will begin consultation this summer on a harbour walkway plan that will stretch from James Bay, past the Johnson St. Bridge up to Rock Bay.
I hope that unlike the Songhees, this path will be inclusive not only for walkers but cyclists and bladers as well. I’m sure we’ll be looking to Vancouver for inspiration.
I’m with that Dutch guy who says there should be no markings at all. Then the path users have to be aware of what is going on around them and can’t just put their heads down and barrel through with the idea “I have the right of way”. There was a planning theorist who suggested that this is how cities work “partisan mutual adjustment” he called it.
Lindblom his name was – sorry, I had to google off to get his name.
That’s pretty much the way that the seawall on the south side of False Creek works. That system works well if people “keep right”, but especialy near blind corners and curves (i.e. high bushes) a pedestrian walking on the left (perhaps with long dog leash in tow) often runs headlong into a cyclist or a jogger keeping to the right (regardless of speed).
I don’t know if that Dutch idea would work here. We are far too self-consumed to regulate ourselves. We participate in leisure, not to participate in nature, but to escape from the spectacle of 9-5, yet still retain the hyper-individualist structure of that world. We can’t even figure out traffic circles for fuck’s sake.
I have maintained for some time that a network of serious bike paths, intended to provide a safe route for large numbers of cyclists to travel to work or other destinations throughout the metropolitan area, would require bike paths about the width of a regular roadway, that is, about 24 feet wide or more to allow for travel in both directions.