Rob Macdonald is well-known in the development world (best-known holdings or developments include the St. Regis Hotel at Dunsmuir and Seymour and the Hudson/Shore Club building next door that he announced as his first celebratory project when the NDP were defeated in 2001).

But he’s been stepping out into the media world more lately, with columns on the Olympic village mess (blaming various city administrations for their bad decisionsand now, this week, on bike lanes.

I’ve been hearing rumours from people in both Vision and the NPA that he’s thinking of running for council. If he does, he won’t have any shortage of strong opinions. His speech to the Urban Development Institute a year ago went around like wildfire.

In spite of his reputation for outspokenness, he tends to be mild-mannered, almost courtly, in private conversations. If he did enter politics, there’s one guarantee: He wouldn’t be dull.

Here’s his salvo on bike lanes.

Downtown Bike Lane Expansion

The City of Vancouver has over 400 kilometers of bike lanes and 98% of them have been properly planned over many years in accordance with the City’s long-term strategic transportation plan.  However, the recent unwarranted and unwanted expansion of the pre-existing downtown Vancouver bike lanes principally on Hornby and Dunsmuir Streets has been a disaster, and a lesson in abysmal government practice.

This civic failure has several components:

1.                 There was close to zero public input prior to the installation of the Dunsmuir bike lane expansion.  What little information that was provided to the public was misleading and the public was intentionally given no voice on the matter.

2.                 After thousands of complaints about the Dunsmuir fiasco, the bureaucrats decided to hold a very brief information and public input process on the proposed Hornby bike lane expansion.  This process was a complete sham, as the civic government completely ignored the public’s strong opposition to the Hornby design, with the ultimate slap in the face being to begin construction on the destruction of Hornby Street only six hours after a midnight Council hearing approved the project.  Wasting everyone’s valuable time when the decision to proceed was already cast in concrete completely proved the City Council’s lack of respect and distain for the views of the directly affected citizens, 97% of whom were against the patently flawed plan.

3.                 The massive expansion of the already existing bike lanes has required a deletion of critical street parking, loading zones, traffic lanes and right turn lanes.  These harmful changes to what heretofore were primary arterial roads are in direct contravention of the City’s transportation plan.  This existing transportation plan, which had universal acceptance and led to the original and workable bike lanes, was specifically against the further deletion of critical traffic and parking lanes.

4.                 The previous bike lane design for downtown was workable and balanced.  The recent installation of the expanded and separated bike lanes has been carried out by extremists who are completely uncaring about the many parties whose interests are tied to these major arteries.  How else could someone consciously design a system that is so unbalanced in approach and so destructive to so many people?

The transportation department says the “divided” bike lanes are safer for cyclists.  Tell that to the woman who recently t-boned a delivery truck on Dunsmuir while in the bike lane; and the fire truck crew who could not come to her assistance for 20 minutes because the divided bike lanes prevented the fire truck from turning from Seymour onto Dunsmuir, causing the ambulance to get stuck as traffic backed up to the Georgia Viaduct.  This all occurred even after City staff and Council had been emphatically told that fire trucks would not be able to properly make this turn because of the bike lane barriers.

5.                 What appears clear is that few, if any, Councillors paid much attention to the actual faulty design.  Not paying attention to something so important is a complete abrogation of duty.  Essentially, the project was the product of the radical environmentalists who are the same kind of people who organize the regular Critical Mass Bike Protest which breaks the law on a regular basis.  Unfortunately, this crowd appears to have the current Mayor’s support, since he has ridden in their egregious event and as such, has supported their unlawful behaviour.

So what is the result of this lunacy:

• Traffic jams for cars and buses which wastes peoples valuable time and creates more pollution.
• Loss of access to people’s businesses.
• Dangerous cycling conditions in several areas.
• Serious life safety concerns where fire trucks have no ability to properly circulate.
• The loss of at least a million dollars of annual parking meter revenue for the City in a time of budget cuts.
• A substantial drop in sales revenue, in some cases upwards of 30%, in most all of the businesses directly impacted.
• Job losses.
• Business closures.
• Shopkeeper’s life savings wiped out.
• Falling property values.
• Falling property tax revenue which the City needs for other important initiatives.
• A downtown traffic plan that is so compromised that many people don’t even want to come downtown anymore unless they absolutely have to, which negatively affects the whole economic fabric of downtown Vancouver.

And all these patently obvious negatives were clear to see for anyone who had any measure of foresight but, unfortunately, our current crop of civic politicians seem to have a distinct lack of vision.  What is crystal clear is that many of our current Councillors are guilty of psychopathic delusion and have become sanctimonious partisans who would prefer to feel good about themselves in isolation from what is good for the vast majority of their constituents.

What was originally labelled and sold as a “trial” has now changed.  The new phrase coming from the mouths of people like my cycling Councillor friend, Raymond Louie, is that people will just have to learn to “adjust”.  This is like cutting off someone’s legs and telling them everything will be just fine once they learn to “adjust”.  Councillors are saying things like “don’t worry, the increased number of cyclists will be good shoppers.”  Pardon me if I find this rather hard to believe.  In fact I find it hard to believe that anyone would be so out of touch with reality to even say such a thing.

The public hates being lied to.  Foolish decisions are one thing but lying to the public is another matter altogether.  With the downtown bike lane expansion there are two matters which bare close review:

1)                The transportation department appears to be providing incorrect information to the public about actual bike lane usage.  We know this because we have our own 24-hour cameras that monitor Dunsmuir Street and our actual results show that the City is wildly overstating the actual usage.  Either our extremely expensive digital cameras are wrong, or someone at City Hall is fudging the facts.

2)                The transportation department repeatedly stated that the downtown bike lane expansion was “only a trial”.  Now does anyone actually believe that the City would spend $25 million of taxpayer’s hard-earned money on this gold-plated boondoggle if it was just a simple “trial”?  Does anyone actually find these people in City Hall believable when they have showed only contempt towards the public on this issue up until now and ignored the fact that 97% of the directly affected public was against the separated bike lane expansion in the first place?  When people like Councillor Raymond Louie say things like – “people need to adjust” – does that sound like these installations, which have been secured deep in the ground with concrete and reinforcing steel, are just a “trial”?  From every angle it appears that the public is being lied to; pure and simple.

This is not the Canadian way and this is not the way to go about making our City a better place.

On an entirely personal note, I am one of the lucky ones in this nightmare.  Our business was the only one allowed to speak to City Council before the Dunsmuir bike lane expansion was approved.  The transportation engineers were about to materially harm our business on Dunsmuir by removing the passenger loading zone at our hotel.  Councillor Meggs personally stepped in to save our right to load passengers and their luggage after I literally begged him to do so, and I appreciate his actions.  I only wish Council would look at all the other businesses that have and will be ruined by this bike lane expansion with the same caring that Mr. Meggs showed to me.

City Council needs to effectuate the obvious solution which is to restore the downtown bike lanes to the way they were previously.  This would restore balance to the traffic system and preserve economic vitality in the downtown Vancouver core.  That is the view of the hundreds of people and organizations I have heard from on this matter.

Mr. Macdonald is an avid cyclist and a major financial supporter of cycling events in Vancouver.