Cycling in Vancouver

Cycling in Vancouver

Both yesterday and today I’ve been taking advantage of Vancouver’s various cycle paths to put a good deal of enjoyable kilometers under my tires. It’s hard to compare Vancouver cycling with cycling in Toronto, but I can put it this way – in Vancouver, I actually look forward to getting on my bike.

In Toronto, getting on a bicycle means crashing over gaps in the poorly maintain roads – not that Vancouver’s are perfect, but the lack of freeze thaw makes things easier. In Toronto, being in a bike lane means constantly having to anticipate a door prize – Vancouver does have some of these death-trap bike lanes, but for the most part you can ride on traffic-calmed streets that are actually set up for bicycles to go through. I tend to think of Vancouver’s bike routes as “bike highways”, although you can’t actually go that fast on them.

But, aside from all these planning and weather differences – the real reason cycling in Vancouver is an order of magnitude more enjoyable is simply that there is more to see. An hours cycling in Vancouver can take you up Commercial drive, down the central valley greenway to Science World, along the downtown seaside bike route by Yaletown and the West End, past English Bay, Lost Lagoon, and then twisting around the Stanley Park Seawall back to the West End. Sure, Toronto has some nice places, but they don’t repeat, don’t all tie together with the geological nice-ness of Vancouver.

Sure, Toronto has the Don and Humber Valleys, which can provide a good half-days cycle each – but getting to them from anywhere you might live means trekking down dangorous and poorly maintained city streets. Bloor Street this summer was in a state of disrepair that would embarrass a third-world dictator – and this means you can’t ride fast enough to not be an obstacle to traffic. Neither does it help that most major streets in Toronto connect to high speed freeways, which changes the pace of driving in general away from a tempo at which bikes can be anything but a nuisance.

People in Vancouver lead charmed lives. And it’s not like they don’t take advantage of it – everywhere I’ve been today has been chalk full of people, all sorts. The Beaches, the bike racks, the walking paths, there are folks out everywhere. And yet, as I sit in the shade near the Second Beach concession in Stanley Park, nothing feels crowded. The opposite of the fireworks then. No, but even the fireworks at Kits beach last night were not really crowded – the rain kept too many Surrey-ites away for that.

It’s often said that Vancouver isn’t any “fun” – that we have a real shortage of festivals compared to other “World Class” cities (whatever “world class” means, anyway). To remedy this there are some new events happening – yesterday I spent a bit of time at a free music festival in Crab Park, and also stopped to listen to a few songs at the South-Asian music celebration festival at Plaza of Nations. Both of these events were extremely poorly attended. Now, this might be because they were poorly advertised, or just because they were lousy events – but I have a feeling that poor attendance to events like this might have something to do with the fact there are plenty of things to do on a sunny Saturday in Vancouver other than go to a mediocre free concert.

Bike lanes, and why cyclists are better off without them

Bike lanes seem to have some plus points – the city is carving a place on the road for bikes, theoretically making cycling in traffic safer, and faster during traffic jams.

However, the reality happens to be the opposite. While bike lanes create the illusion of safety, they tend to produce situations of extreme unsafety in two ways. First, if the bike lane is between a lane of traffic and a lane of parking, then the bike lane is exactly where you should not ride if you don’t want to subject yourself to the possibility of a door prize. The danger of opening car doors is a real one, and made worse by the lack of liability motorists are subject to if they hurt a cyclist by opening a car door without looking. Whereas if a car hits you from behind and you are killed, the motorist can be charged with driving without due care and attention causing death – penalty, up to many years in prison. However, if you are killed by an open door the most the motorist can be charged, in Toronto at least, is 110$ for improperly opening a vehicle door. So, riding in a bike lane next to parking is putting your life in hands of people who stand to lose almost nothing by ending it.

Bike lanes where there is no parking look better – but only at first. The difficulty is they are used for parking. It is not practically possible to enforce no-parking-in-bike-lane laws. And it is pointless to complain at the people doing it – they are simply being rational given the enforcement and their own constraints and interests. The solution is to simply add another lane of traffic instead of a bike lane – many fewer truck drivers are willing to block a lane of traffic than block a bicycle lane. Also, although the enforcement might be similarly inept, the fine is much higher – and if you leave the vehicle it could be towed.

But, how could getting rid of bike lanes possibly be good for cyclists? Because it could be promoted that cyclists should ride in lanes of traffic. City speed limits could be reduced to 40km/h to help cyclists keep up, and the legal right of cyclists to take a lane of traffic (which at this time exists, but is only somewhat known and poorly advertised) could be publicised and stressed.

The alternate solution is to radically seperate cyclists from traffic with physically seperate bike lanes, like in Munich, Montreal, and Amsterdam.

The point is – cycling can be safe and efficient in a city only when the question of whether bikes are the same as cars is answered forcefully in one or the other direction.

On Elation

Last night I finished my last paper for core theoretical. So, while I have several other things due before I am finished the term, I do feel over the hump in the sense of having completed almost all the work I dislike – I’m really quite looking forward to the rest.

Today is warm, sunny, and bright. Like yesterday and the day before. Today my challenge is to get my bike on the road. Hopefully Valerie will no longer be scared of the snow (it is almost completely absent now), and we can go for a ride. Speaking of snow – my post on snow from december was printed in the Co-op Newsletter “COOP D’ETAT”. However, whereas in the past the publication had the funkyness of a real zine, it now has all the originality of an eigth graders last minute english project – I am actually quite embarassed to be published in it, but more than this, I’ve learned how essential presentation is to text even when the text is prose like.

I also want to say that wordpress has messed about with the appearence of its blog creation pages, and they’ve made a real hash of it. It’s really much less user friendly, as well as less aesthetic overall, than before.

A tribute to a friend

My friend will likely never read this post, because for reasons I don’t myself fully understand, I am not telling anyone about this blog. (If there is an obvious reason – it is because no one who matters reads blogs anyway, so a blog “for no one” is the logical extension of the very idea of blogging).

I have a friend who is not a close friend. In fact, she is much “cooler” than me. But despite this, whenever I hang out with her, or speak with her on the phone or MSN, she has the uncanny ability to (unconsciously I think), make me feel witty and “with it”. Clever even. It’s not simply a matter of compliments, its more about the way she draws coolness out of people. And that makes people happy, or at least, it makes me happy. So, thanks friend.