Car-friendly Surrey, B.C. to receive new bike lanes
The city of Surrey, B.C., has become the most recent in a string of Canadian municipalities to approve new bike infrastructure—and it’s a rather well-timed announcement, too, coming midway through Bike to Work Week.
Nine kilometres of on-street bike lanes, 5 km of separated green ways and a network of segregated one-way cycle tracks are all part of the initiative, a plan estimated to cost the city $5 million. A new bike path skirting the east side of Highway 1 to the Port Mann Bridge, slated to be finished and operational in about a month, is part of the cycling goody bag, too. And not only that, but the Bridge itself—a toll bridge for drivers—will be completely free for cyclists.
That new cycling infrastructure is coming to Surrey is a barometer of the growing nationwide acceptance, even civic enshrinement, of cycling as a viable mode of transportation. Winnipeg, Calgary, Waterloo, Ont., and a host of other Canadian cities have all announced new investments in progressive, sustainable bike infrastructure. Surrey, however—a city designed for cars from the ground up—is a somewhat special case. Separated from downtown Vancouver and most of the Lower Mainland by the Port Mann Bridge, the geography of the city has long made driving the dominant mode of getting around. In that light, this week’s announcement must come as a profound step forward for Surrey’s cycling community—a community that has previously been found on the trails more than on the streets.
“A lot of the product that we sell has definitely switched to a more commuter-style bike,” Cecil Milligan, the owner of a local Bike Zone store, told the CBC—evincing Surrey’s shifting bike climate.
Until recently, keeping vital cycling statistics hasn’t been a priority for the city’s transportation authorities. Data—how many people ride their bikes to work, age groups, the number of cyclists in all and so on—has been relatively scant, making it hard to gauge the community’s response empirically, or even the scale of that community itself. But judging from what cyclists have been telling the CBC, the scene is thriving, and the announcement is a welcome, wonderful thing, officially recognizing Surrey as a town, they say, that is absolutely great for biking.
“Surrey is really wonderful, in my view,” one of those cyclists told the CBC. “You build it and they will come because right now we’re encouraging cyclists to get out there. I come from North Vancouver and when I get to Surrey I say, ‘I love it, I love it.'”
