Remove, review or retain: St. John’s faces dilemma following complaints about new bike network

In 2011, a network of new bike lanes came to St. John’s, NL. On Tuesday, though, two councillors told the CBC that the lanes are not working out—not in their current form, at any rate.

“There’s two gentleman that ride their bikes to work,” Coun. Bruce Tilley, representing the Cowan Heights area in which those lanes were laid down, told reporters. Calling them “lonely places” in conversation with the CBC, Tilley said the lanes aren’t being used by local residents. Meanwhile, area residents, he said, have been complaining about the loss of parking spaces to make way for the lane on their street—a lane that, those two cyclists aside, is apparently collecting proverbial mothballs. “No one else uses it,” Tilley said.

It’s not that he’s against bikes, he said. Presumably, the issue is that the bike lanes’ use, in his opinion, doesn’t justify 2011’s $3 million price tag for the new infrastructure. “Just take the lanes that are there out altogether and just come up with a new plan,” Tilley suggested. A colleague of his on city council, Art Puddister, agrees. Citing a down tick in property values—something he attributes to absence of parking in front of the houses—Puddister added, “This is something we need to deal with sooner rather than later.” Between the lines of both comments was a preference to rip the bike lanes out first, and ask questions later.

The streets in question are Old Topsail Road, Frecker Drive, Canada Drive, and others. But not everyone in St. John’s city government agrees that the lanes need to be done away with right away. Instead, another councillor suggested, a more thorough, careful alternative to ripping them out altogether should be pursued.

“I’m not sure everything was implemented correctly,” Coun. Dave Lane said, conceding so far as to agree that the plan, as the CBC reported, may have been “incomplete.” Rather than scrapping the bike lane network completely, though, Lane said that a review—what works, what doesn’t, and what to do about it—would be a better way forward. “We have to have a discussion with all types of cyclists because you’ve got people who train on them, you’ve got people who ride recreationally, and then people who commute,” he said.

Significantly, one of those demographics is St. John’s student community.

With few other transportation options for city cyclists, student organizations—particularly those serving international students—at Memorial University say that a bike lane network is necessary, no matter what the cost. Cost, in fact, is a critical consideration that makes the lanes necessary, with students facing financial hardships having few other transportation options than those on two wheels. Some can’t afford cars; others are under-served by transit in St. John’s. The solution to the issue of bike lanes going unused, said Joseph Bautista, is simple: just make them more visible, and educate cyclists about their options. Don’t just shove them under the rug to the detriment of all.

“Make it more visible,” he said, quoted by the CBC. “We have those racks on the buses—advertise. The Metrobuses have them on the front of the buses but they’re not advertised as such. People don’t know or are aware of it.”