ABC Park Board to redesign Stanley Park bike lane to return vehicle lanes

ABC's Park Board majority will redesign Stanley Park's bike lane design to return two vehicle lanes to reduce congestion

Concrete barriers for the bike lane on Stanley Park Drive, Summer 2021. (Vancouver Park Board)

The newly elected leadership of the Vancouver Park Board will make a compromise to Stanley Park Drive’s configuration that addresses the concerns and needs of both recreational bike and vehicle traffic.

Cyclist access on the roadway will be maintained, with a revised design that re-examines how a permanent bike lane can go in without disrupting vehicle traffic and impacting cyclist access and safety.

At the same time, vehicles will see greatly improved reliability, peak traffic redundancy, and reduced congestion from the return of two vehicle travel lanes on the roadway.

“The end goal is to allow for both vehicle and bike traffic without reduced capacity to vehicles or bicycles,” Taylor Verrall, the director of communications for the governing ABC Vancouver party, told Daily Hive Urbanized.

You might also like:

For most of the past two years since the onset of the pandemic, under the direction of the outgoing coalition COPE and Green Party majority of Park Board commissioners, there has been a separated bike lane on one of the two travel lanes.

All of this will be pushed forward by ABC Vancouver’s supermajority control of the Vancouver Park Board, with the party’s elected candidates filling six of the seven seats starting on November 7, when they will be inaugurated. Green Party commissioner Tom Digby will be looking in from outside the governing party’s lines and coordination.

But before a permanent revision is made to the design, the controversial separated bike lane configuration of temporary traffic cones and concrete barriers — fixtures that have been in place since their continuous return starting in Spring/Summer 2021 — will be removed later this fall. The impact on cyclists will be minimal given that cycling numbers fall off significantly over the winter when there is typically cold, inclement weather.

“Our policy is to immediately restore car traffic right away, but we will not initiate that until the rain season returns,” ABC campaign manager Kareem Allam told Daily Hive Urbanized in an interview.

Additionally, the ABC-controlled Park Board will immediately direct Park Board staff to reopen vehicle access to the parking lots from Beach Avenue.

Allam says the party fully supports the bike lane as there is clearly “high demand on bike lanes,” but at the same time he says it must be acknowledged that there is also “high demand for vehicle lanes” and that “this is not a commuter bike lane — it is a recreational bike lane.”

But the key difference between cyclists and those in vehicles is that it can take up to 90 minutes for people in vehicles to get out of the park during peak season bumper-to-bumper congestion on a single-vehicle lane.

“We believe that through engineering, we can accommodate both the bike lane and two vehicle lanes,” said Allam.

“We will direct Park Board staff to create space to accommodate that recreation cycling capacity, which has been so well received during this trial period.”

This first major attempt by the Park Board at compromise over the issue also addresses the concerns of restaurant businesses in the park, the City’s Persons with Disability Advisory Committee, and the City’s Seniors’ Advisory Committee, who repeatedly told the outgoing Park Board that they felt their concerns on the impacts of the existing bike lane were not being ignored.

“We heard so much from groups that represent people with disabilities that their access to Stanley Park has been severely compromised,” said Allam.

“Yes, it is about merchants and car traffic, but this is also about seniors and the disabled community being able to access the park, and we’re 100% committed to making Vancouver the most accessible city in the world and we’re not ignoring those voices.”

The new design for the permanent bike lane that accommodates the needs of both cyclists and vehicle traffic will be gradually implemented starting in Spring 2023.

Cyclists also have the use of the bike lane on the Stanley Park seawall.

Prior to the pandemic, Stanley Park Drive’s design entailed two lanes for vehicles.

Over the first few months of the pandemic in 2020, general vehicle access within Stanley Park was mostly restricted, as both vehicle lanes of Stanley Park Drive had been converted into a bike lane — a physical distancing measure, which also entailed banning cyclists from the seawall.

Vehicles regained access to Stanley Park in Summer 2020, with one lane dedicated to cyclists, and one lane retained for vehicles. But businesses in the park already struggling from the pandemic’s initial blunt hit took issue with the traffic impacts and changes to parking access. The initial temporary bike lane was removed in Fall 2020, before making a return just before the peak season of 2021 with some changes to the design.

Extreme vehicle traffic congestion was an issue over some summer periods when vehicle traffic was restricted to just one lane. The carriages of Stanley Park Horse-Drawn Tours also use the single-vehicle lane, and their operations add to the impact.

Over the last two years of their governance, the COPE and Green Party majority’s rationale for the separated bike lane changed from a need for physical distancing to a desire to reduce vehicle traffic for the perceived significant climate change impacts from people arriving at Stanley Park by vehicle.

You might also like: