Granville and Cambie Street Bridge bike lanes soon to be a reality?

Love them or hate them, bike lanes are here to stay and in fact you’ll be seeing a lot more of them, especially in and around downtown Vancouver. The city is currently seeking proposals to hire a firm to study the options and viability of bike lanes on both Granville and Cambie bridges. We first discussed this idea after we sifted through the city’s 2040 transportation plan.

Granville Street Bridge Bike Lane:

• The two centre lanes will have a raised walkway that would be shared by pedestrians and cyclists (as pictured above).
• The shared pathway would start around 8th Ave.
• No mention on where this centre walkway will terminate.
• The realignment of the Granville Loops may factor in and could be a termination point for the bike/pedestrian lane or serve as a connector to existing bike routes on Hornby (separated) and Richards (painted).

Cambie Bridge Bike Lane

• Will require turning one of the three lanes exiting downtown into a bike lane as far as the 2nd Avenue off ramp,
• Will feed into the existing bike route

The city’s goals is to have two-thirds of all trips downtown on foot, bike or transit. We all know that transit expansion will be slow in the coming decades, unless of course TransLink figures out how to solve their financial problem. Foot traffic will increase as more and more people realize the benefits of living closer to the city centre and decide to actually relocate there. Biking is really becoming an option for citizens living in the city. With the impending arrival of Vancouver’s Bike Share Program, cycling will only see an increase.

Undoubtedly eliminating vehicle only lanes will upset many. The city will “hear’ them state their case and rubber stamp the bike lanes, just as they did with the Hornby Street bike lane. I’m not entirely sure that a bike lane is needed for Cambie Bridge, but Granville Street Bridge makes a perfect candidate. Just not sure if the centre alignment is the way to go. We’ll leave that up to the experts to weigh in.