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Stanley Park Causeway improvements welcome, but more work needs to be done: Vancouver bike advocates

The completion of Vancouver's new bike route along the Stanley Park Causeway has elicited a warm, welcoming response, reports say.

February 27, 2016
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The completion of Vancouver’s new bike route along the Stanley Park Causeway has elicited a warm, welcoming response, reports say. But according to the city’s chief cycling advocacy group, there’s still more work to be done elsewhere in the B.C. city.

As Canadian Cycling Magazine previously reported when construction started in September, calls for improvements to the main road through Stanley Park date back to 2013, when a rider using the sidewalk—for many Vancouver riders, the only route previously available through the Park—mistakenly dropped off the curb into the flow of traffic, where she was struck and killed by a bus. New features added to the Causeway make the route considerably more safe and protected for cyclists, and it’s those aspects of the project, now finished, that advocates say are most welcome.

“It is a huge improvement from what it was before,” said Erin O’Melinn, the executive director of HUB, in conversation with the CBC. “They have added safety fencing and widened the bike lane on both the east and west sides.” In addition to that barrier, the widened bike lane means that pedestrians and riders, without putting themselves at risk, can safely pass each other.

“This is a really important connector between the North Shore and Vancouver,” O’Melinn added. “There are already 2,200 people cycling it every day, and we expect that to grow now that it does feel so much safer.”

But despite how much safer the new Stanley Park route—a project that cost about $7 million, a price advocates say is well worth paying for such infrastructure—has made cycling in Vancouver, there are still “gaps” that need to be filled in, O’Melinn said. Across the city, such gaps mean that cyclists have to take risks just to travel from one side of town to the other. Supporting that argument, a map put together by HUB, detailing downtown Vancouver’s cycling network, shows several areas where those bike routes don’t meet. Along with broken connections like that between the Port Mann Bridge and the Central Valley Greenway—a gap that means riders traveling from Vancouver can’t safely reach the Port Mann Bridge, and across its span, municipalities like Surrey—HUB is also working with the province, identifying other areas, like Stanley Park, that would benefit from infrastructure improvements.

“We are aso looking at the Massey [Tunnel] conversion into the new bridge,” O’Melinn told the CBC, “and how that can better connect Richmond and Delta and destinations beyond such as the ferries and the border.”

With cycling on the rise on the west coast—and across Canada—advocates say that such improvements would draw even more riders.