Badger,what would you suggest instead spending the money for City of Vancouver for cycling infrastructure? I'm not sure what the non-cycling, roads intrastructure budget....unless one runs over the website on the city budget. Shouldn't be hard ...since you work for the city (fire dept. counts as part of the whole city budget).

Separated bike lanes is the next step up. It doesn't make sense to spend alot of $$$ for this as the lst stage, to put it on a residential street in a residential neighbourhood. Put it where the car traffic is genuinely heavy. But even that, Vancouver's car traffic volume is quite pale..compared to Toronto where I biked into downtown core for several years with over 1 million people pouring into the same area for work.

Would you suggest bike lane, separated lanes (emphasis) in East Vancouver somewhere closer to Hastings St.? Would alot more people want to ride in that area? (I have to say, I did part of it..where the homeless some drug addicts hang out... daily on a commute for a few years going home. )

The reality is that:

the local cycling advocacy group with the City of vancouver engineering staff went over several proposed other streets in the downtown core. Helmucken St. was one of them and the list goes on. Except it gets steep and narrow. Not wide enough. I've ridden it many times since it's close to home (now my 2nd home).

It just sounds to me, the big unspoken message is put bike lanes anywhere except any downtown core in any city where there businesses and that'll keep everyone happy. Is that the route?

And we will never be able to pedestrianize our core downtown streets like some of the bigger European cities with good transit, etc.

What did the Winter OLympics teach us: A ton of people adjusted. Over 1 million people were not using cars in the downtown core...every day. City had an aggressive plan during the Olympics and cut down 30% daily car traffic coming into thecity. So yes, Vancouver proved..to itself, to its own citizens it COULD do it.

It proved to the world. That's why City of Vancouver did think seriously about separated bike lanes. Various public transportation planners and urban planners in north America are intrigued what actually happened during that time in our city.

Sorry. I gotta skype to dearie in Vancovuer. I'm in Calgary....the city of god....I don't want get into this. It's nightmarish biking around here. They barely have painted bike lanes on their 4 lane one way streets downtown. Think of Richards St. and multiply that by 20 streets. It's kind of sick and sad.