City looking at separated bike lanes on University Drive?
A suggestion we posted this May has made its way to City Hall – separated bike lanes may soon be coming to Downtown Surrey!
Earlier this year, we argued that for Downtown to become a more walkable and bikeable place, the City should begin reallocating excess road space for separated bike lanes. Doing so now, before too much of the area gets built out, will ensure that as new residents move in, they already have safe biking infrastructure available for use. Roads like Old Yale, Whalley Boulevard, and University Drive were given as prime candidates for separated bike lanes.
According to minutes from the Transportation Committee’s July meeting, the committee requested that staff look at introducing parking and bike lanes in the curb lanes along University Drive. The Committee consists of Councillors Tom Gill, Barinder Rasode, Marvin Hunt, and Barbara Steele.
We’ve been told that the Engineering department was looking at introducing separated bike lanes on King George between 108 Ave and 104 Ave, but is considering putting the infrastructure on University instead due to concerns from the business community.
While we at Civic Surrey wholeheartedly support an efficient reallocation of underutilized lanes on University Drive, a shared parking/biking lane creates dangerous hazards for cyclists and drivers. We contend that an effective and safe urban landscape for pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists requires that each user is provided their own, physically separated space.
We recommend that, as a pilot project, the City redesign the eastern curb lane of University into a bi-directional, north-south bike lane, separated from traffic by planters, and reallocate the western curb lane to on-street parking. This will provide a much needed safe cycling connection in North Surrey, completing the City’s portion of the BC Parkway route along the Expo SkyTrain. It will also provide more parking for residents and users of regional facilities like the Whalley Ball Park or City Centre Library. On-street parking will also help calm traffic, producing a more pleasant experience for pedestrians.
The new Cycling Plan released earlier this year recommended the exploration of separated bike lanes in appropriate areas.
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A physically separated bike lane might make cycling safer on stretches of straight road, but it is probably more likely to cause accidents at intersections. The concrete planters and shrubbery, which is pulled right up to the intersection, form a wall making it very hard for drivers to check for cyclists during a turn.
Rather than thinking of each mode of transportation as separate and discrete, we could try to think of all transportation as part of a unidirectional flow, where the slowest moving traffic (pedestrians) is off to the sides and the fastest moving (cars) is in the middle, not unlike a river flow.
In this model, cyclists will fit between the pedestrians and cars. But unlike on many roads where the cyclist is right next to moving vehicles, the bike lane should be directly beside the sidewalk, separated from the driving lane by the parking lane. This way the parked cars will form a barrier for cyclists, and pedestrians will be protected by the raised sidewalks. This has the added benefit of creating more visibility in intersections, since cars are not allowed to park within 9 metres of an intersection.
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You can get around that by adopting how it is done in some European cities with different lights for each mode of transportation. Aka bikes don’t cross at the same time as cars and cars on those intersections are restricted from turning right when they have a red light.
So you shouldn’t have anyone legally turning right in front of a crossing bike because 1 or the other shouldn’t be happening at the same time.
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The curb lane is 4.0m wide. This leaves 2.2m for a parking lane and 1.8m for the bike lane. The only problem is that the lane should be 5m wide. There should be a 1m painted buffer. With a passenger opening up the door into the bike lane there is no room for a cyclist to get out of the way. That is why there is a 1m wide buffer provided.
http://bikehub.ca/sites/default/files/imce/pcmp_design_guidelines.pdf – Page 21What the city should do is get rid of the centre median to provide the extra room for this configuration. The centre median is 4.2m wide. Yes it makes the street pretty but we will have trees in between the sidewalk already and we will sacrifice cyclist lives. The street will function much better without the centre median, after all this is supposed to be a Green Street, not a divided freeway or parkway which most of the arterial roads in Surrey feel like.
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