Progress Vancouver party promises new safe and secure public bike parking

Bike parkade at SkyTrain's Bridgeport Station. (TransLink)

Vancouver’s rampant bike theft problem is one of the greatest deterrents to getting more people to consider cycling for getting around.

The very real concern over whether a bike will be stolen while it is parked and secured in a public space — due to the lack of secured indoor public parking locations — is perhaps a greater factor for growing cycling’s transportation modal share than the size of the city’s bike lane network.

Mark Marissen, the mayoral candidate for the Progress Vancouver party, has made a new campaign platform promise to build secured public bike parking.

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“I think more people would use these bike lanes if people felt safe parking their bike somewhere. So many people are quite concerned, understandably, if they park their bike [on the curb]. Somebody can just take it away,” he said in a video posted on Twitter on Friday.

“What I think we need to do is to build secure places to park your bike, somewhere where you can feel safe and not have to worry whether your bike is going to be gone after you just purchased it.”

Marissen specifically notes his proposed policy steps of adding secure bike parking at City-owned parking lots, installing bike lockers across Vancouver starting in downtown, and working with TransLink to expand its secure bike parking facilities at transit stations.

Bike parkade at SkyTrain’s Bridgeport Station. (TransLink)

translink bike lockers skytrain moody centre station

Bike lockers outside SkyTrain and West Coast Express’ Moody Centre Station. (TransLink)

In 2020, TransLink completed a $5.3 million project of adding six secured indoor bike parking facilities at major transit hubs across the region.

And in 2021, over 70 individual smart secure bike lockers were added to a select number of transit hubs across the region, including 22nd Street Station and VCC-Clark Station in Vancouver.

Recent upgrades to Vancouver’s SkyTrain stations of Commercial-Broadway Station, Joyce-Collingwood Station, and King Edward Station also produced secured indoor bike parking.

But much of the bike theft occurs in and around the city centre, where cycling numbers are the greatest, and where there is a lack of major secure indoor public bike parking facilities.

If built as planned, the mixed-use redevelopment of the Hudson’s Bay store building in downtown Vancouver will include a significant secured public bike parkade facility in its lowest basement level, with an on-street bike ramp on Seymour Street that directly links cyclists to the underground facility. This bike parkade, as proposed, will have 1,500 secured bike parking spaces for both building workers and the general public, along with end-of-trip facilities such as change rooms and showers.

674 Granville Street Vancouver hudsons bay redevelopment

Artistic rendering of the secured public bike parade in the redevelopment of Hudson’s Bay’s Vancouver flagship store at 674 Granville Street. (Perkins & Will/Streetworks Development/Hudson’s Bay Company)

According to Vancouver Police Department (VPD) statistics, over 2,100 bikes were reported stolen in 2020, but it is understood that there is an immense underreporting of stolen bikes. Vancouver has by far the greatest number of bike thefts per capita amongst Canada’s major cities.

The reported bike theft numbers in Vancouver are exponentially higher over the summer months than during winter due to the seasonality of cycling.

While Vancouver’s reported bike theft numbers are still extraordinarily high, they represent a 40% drop since 2015’s figures, attributed to the VPD’s launch of its free Project 529 bike registry program — an online database that improves the odds of bike owners being reunited with their recovered bike.

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