Early numbers show significant increase in cycling on bridge

Today was a rainy fall day and no sight of any bikes over the bridge. I cummute from north van to kits everyday. By bus it takes 1 hour, by car 15 mins! when you go over the lions gate bridge they tell drivers to take the granville street bridge. As the weather turns there are less and less riders.
If bikers want to be driving with cars they need to follow the rules of the road. They should have to pay insurance for using the roads, have licence plates like motocycles, and have proper training for driving with traffic. Most bikers weave in and out of traffic. Do not stop at stop lights and signs. Ride against traffic and have no regard for saftey and not wearing proper visible gear. All they are is mortocycles with out proper training and insurance.
Also the whole Idea of Critical Mass doesnt help at all. Fingering cars traffic and tie up traffic is not helping with sharing the road. I get the whole protesting thing but being disrespectful to others is not solving the problem.

If your true riders wear are you when it is raining and snowing.

Maybe a new bridge should be build for Bikes and they can pay tolls for using them.
When the olypics come will they still be allowed access to any street?

As both a cyclist and driver, I can’t say anything positive enough with respect to the cycling lane on the Burrard Bridge. Drivers are ridiculous in their complaints as the Granville Bridge and access from Howe street is just 2 blocks away! The only time I’ve seen the Burrard bridge congested is after work when driving home(north) and merging onto Pacific. This congestion has absolutely nothing to do with the bike lane.

We’re constantly promoting an earth-friendly and fit lifestyle, and the bikelane facilitates both. It’s long overdue that we put our money where our mouth is. I’ve been hit by a car on my bike and so I know something about cycling safely in the city. I used to use the Granville bridge when riding south and that involved problems with cycling in a narrow lane and limited visibility…..both leading to a scary commute and angry drivers.

wake up Vancouver and support our city in trying to be a leader in promoting a green and fit lifestyle!

The real story about vehicle congestion and delays is on the approaches on and off the bridge - and this is summer!

Try getting on or off the Burrard or off the Granville Street Bridge onto Pacific on a rainy day in November- now there’s congestion/traffic insanity!

I’m sorry -I live in the West End, and now I travel at least 10 blocks out of my way to use the Granville Street Bridge, and 10 blocks again on the way home (not to mention the gas I burn sitting on the Granville off-ramp trying to get home).

I am a cyclist and would gladly commute by bike but it’s completely impractical for the type of job/place I work. So get real and stop trying to pretend that this “experiment” is actually going to work in mid-winter!

When people are saying that cyclists are getting 16.7% of the roadway, are they not forgetting the 8 lanes of Granville and 6 lanes of Cambie that drivers get (exclusively on Cambie)? If you add that in, then cyclists are still only getting 5% of the bridge space into and out of downtown.

I’ve driven Burrard many times since the trial began at all times of day and haven’t had one minute of delay because of the project.

My bus trips on the 44 haven’t changed times at all.

When I cycle (which I haven’t been able to do as much as I’d like due to a knee injury), I haven’t been afraid once of falling into traffic.

I’m more likely to bike to work (when my knee is doing well) now than I ever was before. When I moved to the west side last year, I stopped biking. I was afraid of that bridge.

It is great to see lots of parents with children cycling over the bridge. This something that I definitely did not see before the trial. Keep up the good work.

What motorists in this city should remember before complaining about a ‘waste of taxpayer money’ is that motorists are getting BILLIONS of dollars from the Gateway Project, including a massive Port Mann bridge to encourage more driving, further and further away from the downtown core. The Burrard bike lane trial is necessary for this city to support alternate modes of transportation. More and more people will be using cycling and walking and transit, as other cities (such as Bogota and Portland) have already been encouraging. An extra bike lane on Burrard bridge is a good step, but just one small step that the City needs to take to get people out of their cars. Stubborn motorists who refuse or are simply unable to abandon their cars (because of distance travelled, for example) may be forced to change their minds in the next decade or so. Peak oil is not just a catchphrase, and neither is climate change. We’ve been building for motorists for five decades, it’s time we start building for other means of transport that are less harmful to the planet. I do drive (as well as cycle) - I would not describe myself as a granola-eating hippy (in case that’s what you’re thinking). But I am a realist. The era of the car won’t last forever, and the sooner we plan for that inevitability, the better off we will all be.

Crunch the numbers and the city is allocating 16.7% of the the road to cyclists which averages approximately 7% of the traffic–and the rainy season hasn’t yet started! This does not make sense. Add to that the inability to turn right off the bridge onto Hornby Street is causing more congestion at Howe and Beach during rush hour.

I would be really interested in the number of business people who have opted to ride their bike to work now that the bike lane is in. I don’t know anyone who has switched.

I do think the cement divider on the sidewalk is a good idea. Put the lane back in and put a cement divider on the west sidewalk. This will reduce the pollution that is building up with the cars idling on the bridge!

Wherever possible separate lanes for cyclists are the safest, for all (cyclists and cars); and wherever possible the cyclist lanes should have physical barriers separating them from vehicular traffic. This can be done by erecting three feet high plastic tubes every ten feet or so so as to separate the cyclist lanes from the car lanes.

With increased safety will come more cyclists (Field of Dreams stuff).

And wherever possible, cyclists should be given a dedicated lane within every 3 or 5 roads, so that cyclists can find safe routes to many destinations.

Let’s hope that the bridge test leads to multiple cyclist lanes, for the benefit of all.

Okay, lets crunch the numbers here. Using the figures posted on the stats page to date (July 4th-26th, excluding the 11th and 12th which are incomplete) we come up with an average of 4269 bicycle trips per day, vs 58419 vehicle trips per day, or 7.3%
Yet we have dedicated 16.6% of the deck width for their exclusive use! If we follow the redesign to its natural conclusion (and originally proposed configuration) that will be more like 33%! This is not an efficient use of a limited and expensive resource.

It gets worse if we consider the weather. On the days marked cloudy/rainy that drops to 4094/58622 or 6.9% and we all know that a cloudy/rainy day in July in this city doesn’t begin to approach the misery of one in January. I would like to see this trial run over the winter months and then we’ll see what a tremendous waste of taxpayer’s time and money this truly is.

Vancouver needs to abandon this politically correct infatuation we have with cycling and focus our efforts on transportation that is more suitable for our climate. The proposed streetcar project is an excellent example. Hey - maybe we can finally build the lower-deck rail line the Burrard bridge was designed to have from the beginning?

I travel the Burrad St bridge every day and I count the total number of cyclists on both sides while I cross the bridge deck.

Under the best of conditions, sunny, holidays, mid day or afternoon, I have never encountered more than 30 cyclists on a non demonstration day

Regularly, the number of cyclists is between 5 and 10 in the time it takes a vehicle to cross the bridge, the number of cars even in this very light traffic period of the year is overwhelmingly vehicular.

Any artifical cyclists counts by the city continue to inflate the number of cyclists

Pick any rainy or dark early morning or late afternoon time and the real numbers of the lasting effects of cycling euphoria will clearly demonstrate the cycling crowd is not a viable solution to gridlock caused by road impediments

This site is fantastic. Glad to see the city sharing data like this in real time.

It would be great if the data were available as an RSS and XML feed - this way people mash the data up with other feeds and/or could use the data to do their own analysis on their own websites.

Best,
David Eaves

Thanks for the information – I’ve been wondering what the numbers would look like. Good to see people taking advantage of the bike lanes – I thought I’d noticed a distinct increase in bike traffic on the bridge and elsewhere in the city.

I’ll be curious to see trip times, though. Most of the time the SB vehicle congestion has not looked much worse than it has previously been, but at least one day it looked really bad. Hopefully this will get better as people start to adjust and modify routes.

I have a long cycle commute (from North Vancouver) to Kitsilano and with the air quality being so low in this heat wave I haven’t been using the new lane recently. However I’ve found that commuting by motorbike has been as painless as it was before the bike lane was installed and I have high hopes for permanent adoption of this bike lane. I sincerely believe that the problems that have arisen with people going in the wrong direction, etc. can be addressed, probably with better signage.

Vancouver still has a long way to go to provide safe cycle routes that will help people feel more comfortable riding rather than driving but this is a really good start… the plain fact of the matter is that able-bodied people who aren’t carpooling really need to get out of their cars, but right now the transit and the bike-lane options are sketchy or dangerous and aren’t offering much incentive. We really need to have massively increased and improved transit infrastructure and off-street cycling routes to get the single-driver vehicles off the road.

separate bike lines are always the best. hope to see much more of it in the metro vancouver area in the future.
that way it makes it safe for everyone to use the mode of transportation they prefer