However, the removal of the bike lanes as configured could take place in hours by another council.
In the Big Smoke, Toronto, “[Mayor Rob Ford’s] Killing the cycling committee was a shot across the bow, but the first direct attack on Toronto cycling happened next, when the Jarvis, Birchmount and Pharmacy bike lanes were targeted for removal. And for Jarvis, the clock is terminally ticking.”
Yet also in June 2012, “Ford will be the second city official to accept Toronto’s Bicycle Friendly Communities Award. McMahon presented it to public works chair Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong at the Ontario Bike Summit in April. ”

Dan Egan, formerly active in Vancouver cycling advocacy, points out in this week’s Now paper (a Georgia Straight-like freebie in Toronto) that the Dupont Street bike route is also in danger.

Page 2 (of 15 pages. Read it. It’s short. ) in the report shows that cyclists (how did they identify them?) are recreational in their use of routes. It is not obvious from the quote that these are hard-core commuters.
“Research published by the University of British Columbia in 2007, entitled Cycling in
Cities, found that Vancouverites’ most preferred cycling route types are paved offstreet
paths (e.g. Vancouver’s seawall), residential streets with traffic calming marked
as bike routes (i.e. Vancouver’s local street bikeways) and paths next to major streets
separated by a barrier (i.e. separated bike lanes).”

Why can’t the city provide, online, copies of all the datasets and reports that make up reports so that we can chew on them instead of city-supplied granola?

Page 4
“In July 2011, staff reported to Council that the separated bicycle lanes on Dunsmuir Street, Hornby Street and connecting streets had resulted in:
• an increase in bicycle usage,
• a small but measurable increase in the percentage of women and children cycling,
• no change in pedestrian volumes and improved pedestrian comfort,
• no change in vehicle volumes,
• negligible and localized change in vehicle travel times, and,
• a decrease in vehicle collisions.”:

Hmm.

I hope they have a decent budget to install well-designed barrier structures and planters, maybe a little real stone here & there, not to mention drinking fountains and the odd seating area.

Bike lanes deserve more than mere utilitarian treatment.

@Agustin

If it’s quoted in the report, at least a link to the data should be provided. Espy for an issue that is as contentious as the separated bike lanes are.

As for the stats, the city has taken the interesting way of looking at year to year ridership from April to March… hmmmm I wonder why they did that? Could it be because if you looked January to December, ridership was actually down on the Burrard Bridge? Nahhhhhh couldn’t be.

And the thing that makes me cry the hardest, is that the route that is ACTUALLY working and getting more cyclists year over year is Dunsmuir. No matter which way you slice and dice those numbers, it works. Good thing Comrade Meggs is about to put TNT under the viaducts to make way for his developer buddies to build high-rises. Bah. The Visionistas strike again.

Could it be because if you looked January to December, ridership was actually down on the Burrard Bridge? Nahhhhhh couldn’t be.

A more benign explanation is the City only had stats to March 2012 when the report was written.

@Agustin // Jun 7, 2012 at 6:17 pm #9

“That’s generally not how things work. If it were, City reports (and newspapers, and scientific journals, and ….) would all be extremely large and unmanageable. This is why we have a system for referring to other reports. If you are curious about a citation, you are free to go look it up.”

But they had them at hand, and nowadays it is mainly digital, taking up no space and shared on a common server, they could put a link in the PDF file as presented.

I read science reports often and the datasets are now archived and made available.
If not the full reports referred to, then PubMed, CAS, WoS summaries and abstracts when shouldn’t change and one can get the full texts to read from that.

I’ve been reading the Dutch SWOV report on helmets and they give links even if it is only to their e-card files. See end of article page on page 6-7 PDF “SWOV. Fact sheet. Bicycle helmets.” 245 K 7 pages. swov.nl/rapport/Factsheets/UK/FS_Bicycle_helmets.pdf Retrieved 30 May 2012.
It can be and is being done.

As for looking it up, they don’t give very good textual references, and may not be found with Bing or Google or Blekko.
Examples:
“In October 2010, Council approved the construction of a trial two-way separated bicycle lane on Hornby Street and connecting streets.”
[why is it difficult to give a City minutes link]

“These transportation priorities were reinforced in 2010 by the Greenest City Action Team’s report Vancouver 2020 “A Bright Green Future”.”
[ a pdf at xxncouver.ca/greenestcity/PDF/Vancouver2020-ABrightGreenFuture.pdf ]

“Research published by the University of British Columbia in 2007, entitled Cycling in Cities, found that Vancouverites’ most preferred cycling route types are paved off-street paths… ”
[ a report,
XXclingincities.spph.ubc.ca/ has 62 links embedded in it. If they can do it at UBC, why can’t the city give links. The technology is there, we can follow along. ]

“In July 2011, staff reported to Council that the separated bicycle lanes on Dunsmuir Street, Hornby Street and connecting streets had resulted in…..”
[ and why not links to the raw data to see that they are right, as they will be. It is a matter of a few clicks. They have an Open Data site to store large files as trees, lamp posts, 311 calls, bike route counts etc. data.vancouver.ca/ However they don’t keep it up. The last front page posting of March 2012 implies that this is not a priority. ]

Never mind my gripe. We will get some information in various ways, even data-leaks from the city staff.

@Agustin

1. The report is dated June 5th. You can’t tell me engineers didn’t have April or May figures to cross reference before they finalized the figures. They’ve conveniently delayed posting these numbers because they know they won’t back up the claims. After next week it won’t matter.

2. Please note I said “espy for an issue that is as contentious…” I wouldn’t expect it for every issue, but I believe Bill Lee makes a good point. Doesn’t seem too difficult to link things in.

3. Finally, I know commenters on here like to try to make this into a wedge issue where if you don’t support the current bike lanes, you’re anti bike lanes. And you’re free to continue to do that Agustin. But fact is, many of us don’t dislike cycling or cycling infrastructure. We do have a problem with poorly planned cycling infrastructure that is more about destroying vehicle infrastructure than it is about improving cycling infrastructure.

Vision said build Hornby and they will come. Well they didn’t. They said build Burrard and they will come. Well they didn’t.

Vision said businesses won’t be affected. Well they have. Vision said the Burrard bridge bike lanes will be safer. Well they aren’t.

My question to you Agustin is, unless you’re a Vision hack, how can you still be entrusting good judgement to build cycling infrastructure to people who have been so wrong?

The one route they’ve got right is Dunsmuir and they’re going to destroy it. I can’t believe you can’t see the forest for the trees on this.

Never mind, Paul. I could go through your comment and dispute it bit by bit, backed up by statistics and evidence, but if you believe the engineering department is acting in bad faith, then it’ll just go in one ear and out the other.

I agree with spartikus: if you think there’s a problem with the data, give them a call or send them an email. If that doesn’t get you anywhere, you could always call up one of the non-Vision councilors, the press, or APEGBC. Luckily for all of us, engineers work under a mandated code of ethics, and violations are taken very seriously by the profession.

You’ve simply rephrased you think they deliberately withheld date to write a misleading report. You offer no proof.

Numbers are down

Using the spreadsheet available here I count 47,600 for Hornby Jan 1st – March 31st 2011 and 59,074 for the same period in 2012.

As for businesses hurting, some claim that. But only 4 businesses out of 150 opened their books for Stantec when the economic assessment was done. That was their big opportunity to prove hardship.

Hmm…you’re right on that. I missed it started on Jan 25, 2011. But I think it’s premature to declare an instance of decline of 4% up to possibly 9% in winter as an indication “it’s not working”. It could be a trend, or it could be statistical noise.

The summer numbers will tell the tale.

We see a slight decline in January & March 2012 over 2011 (with February 2012 higher than February 2011). I don’t see a compelling rationale to dispute the recommendation in the Staff Report.

Paul, I think you are asking the wrong question.

It is indeed too early to tell if Hornby’s second year of existence will see more riders than its first year of existence, but why do we need that information before judging if it’s worth keeping?

There are other reasons to keep it.

For instance, safety has increased on Hornby (see the report):

Collisions of all types (involving vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians) are down 19% on Dunsmuir Street and down 18% on Hornby Street (2008 and 2009 vs. 2011).

There’s also the network effect that Hornby creates with Dunsmuir and Burrard.

Re. your question about increasing ridership on Burrard: I ask myself the same thing, and I think that it would help to have more separated lanes in the areas leading to the bridge, both on the south and north side. For example, a lane on Cornwall would likely help. Maybe a lane on West 1st, between Cypress and Burrard…

I also like your idea of trying different lane configurations. Maybe on Cornwall or Commercial (between 1st and 10th) we could see separated lanes on each side of the street, next to each curb.

If you’re interested in looking at the bike lane data, I’d recommend this chart: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/VancouverBikeLaneStats/RidershipVolumes
Some observations:
February and March 2010 saw abnormally high cycling volumes on the Burrard Bridge (thanks to the travel restrictions during the Olympics). One reason to start year-over-year comparisons in April 2010.
It’s interesting to note the network effect that Hornby had on cycling volumes on Dunsmuir. The Hornby lane was installed in December 2010, and since then volumes on Dunsmuir have risen dramatically (the summer-time peak went from 46,000 to 68,000).

@Agustin #22:

You write: “Re. your question about increasing ridership on Burrard: I ask myself the same thing, and I think that it would help to have more separated lanes in the areas leading to the bridge,”

I have to say, I very much admire the chutzpah of this argument. If the data showed a significant increase in cycle use with the separated bike lanes, that would (one suspects) lead to demands for more separated bike lanes. However, the data shows that there hasn’t been a significant increase. So what does that call for? More separated bike lanes!

Bravo, sir. Bravo. 🙂

Agustin, I don’t dispute that ridership has increased. (Or, to be more precise, the number of cyclists using the particular routes has increased; I don’t see anything in the data to suggest the cycling itself is up.) The numbers show that, though the increase seems to have peaked on Burrard. My statement of admiration arose from your creative use of the lack of expected increase.

I agree Chris.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, because I understand that it doesn’t really matter, but I believe that the report indicates that the volume of traffic on the bike lane routes is pretty much the same as it was before the bike lanes. I infer from that the bikes lanes have not resulted in people cycling instead of driving. (Or, if we accept that car use has been declining prior to installation of the bike lanes, perhaps we can infer that bike lanes have stopped the perceived decline? That seems counterintuitive, though.)

If there is an increase in actual cycling numbers, I suspect it’s people who would normally take transit. But that’s just speculation, as we don’t know whether there has been such an increase.

@Richard #31,

As I said, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. I posted an awful lot about it when they were first put in (way way too much, in retrospect) and see no reason to repeat all of that now.

The “main reason” the bikes lanes were put in seems to shift, depending on which numbers are being talked about and which justification is being advanced at any particular time. The whole “legal liability” justification is hogwash, pure and simple.

Based on my review of the numbers, then and now, my view is that the bike lanes were not money well spent and I would oppose any new separated bike lanes, at least until there’s some evidence to suggest that they are of benefit.

To be fair, as I said in my original post, they don’t seem to have caused any significant damage, so I would also oppose removing them.

In saying that, I acknowledge that my opposition means nothing and that people who believe in bike lanes will continue to believe in them, regardless of anything I say.

@Richard #33:

No, Richard. I don’t care about people at all. I want them all to be hurt in traffic accidents. You have divined my position so precisely, that there’s really no need for me to say any more about it.

@ Ian,

My statement of admiration arose from your creative use of the lack of expected increase.

I think it’s my turn to have a cup of coffee because I don’t get what you mean here 🙂 But I’m not often accused of having a lot of chutzpah, so I’ll take it where I can get it, even if it is a bit sarcastic 😉

Anyway, my point was that separated lanes seem to have worked to increase ridership. I say “seem” because there is still the question of whether ridership as a whole has gone up, or whether people have just shifted from other routes to the separated ones. I’d love to see data from the other routes…

It looks to me (again, I couldn’t say with 100% certainty based on the available data, but I think odds are high) that the presence of Hornby helped increase ridership on Dunsmuir. Hence my suggestion that additional separated lanes leading to Burrard from the south could help with ridership there.

As well, Richard’s hyperbolic rhetoric aside, the report does cite statistics that collisions on Hornby are down since the lane was put in. That is fairly good evidence that the separated lane has helped with safety for all road users. I’m hopeful that these results would be replicated elsewhere.

Bike lanes locked in place.

And one person got councillor Heather Deal to start banning all right turns after the fuss about Dunsmuir
—– Deal Tweets —
Heather Deal ?@VanRealDeal
Turning cars are biggest threat to peds. Intersections without turns are safest. #vanpoli
2:01 PM – 13 Jun 12 via Twitter for iPad
1h Heather Deal Heather Deal ?@VanRealDeal
While some turns necessary, safety is a factor and should be taken into account.
———–
So a wiser person tweeted.
@VanRealDeal So by that logic, perhaps all car turns in the city should be prohibited?

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