After a brief moment of hope where the Vancouver Park Board appeared it might reconsider removing the Stanley Park bike lane, a vote on Monday confirmed the vast majority of the park will be put back to its pre-2021 form. Barely 30 per cent of the current temporary bike lane will remain.
The bike lane was put in place in 2021, replacing a more temporary lane from 2020 with semi-permanent infrastructure. It closed one lane of Stanley Park Drive to traffic, leaving one lane for vehicle traffic and one lane for bike traffic. Since then, the bike lane has turned into a flashpoint for opposition to added bike lanes in Vancouver.
Vancouver Park Board is dominated by the ABC party that ran, in part, on the promise to remove the bike lane. Once elected, the Park Board went to work right away on removing the bike lane. Work taking out the easiest parts of the bike lane to remove started in December. A report that estimated the cost of completely removing the bike lane at $425,000 caused the Park Board to reconsider complete removal.
In mid-January, the Park Board voted to reconsider removing the entire bike lane. Three proposals were put forward for partial removal.
On Monday night, the Park Board voted to approve the option that removed the vast majority of the bike lane. 30 per cent, at best, of the 8.5-km will remain once the removal project is complete. The other two proposals would have left far more, if not all of the bike lane in place.
The approved plan was the least expensive proposal, through it still carries a cost of $330,000. It also removes far more of teh bike lane.
Work is planned to be complete by the end of May, 2023.
Despite voting to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to remove the current, “temporary,” bike lane, ABC also approved an amendment to the proposal that requires Park Board staff to create a report on a new bike lane for the park by November 2023. This report, ABC says, would include 2023 summer usage data.
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Canadian Cycling Magazine…