Your city: road bridges with bike lane

[shootingstar]

Thx for clarifying so far Pam about NYC Broadway bridge.

Mimi, do all your road bridges allow bikes? Which ones are off-limits?

Today was the first day for the Burrard St. bridge bike lane reallocation trial. Trial is 3 months long.
Reallocation of 1 car lane to a bike lane for this heritage bridge, is a trial that is being viewed closely since it was tried in 1996 for 1 wk. but stopped because of the car-driver objection and city council backed down.
This 2nd attempt, there has been a lot more planning on advance public communication, the cycling advocacy organization having celebatory bridge rides, cake /coffee giveways to anyone, police providing guidance this wk. at key junction points at both ends of bridge. The city engineering dept. has bike and car counter equipment operating on this bridge and other road bridges nearby to continue statistical collection. There is also motion detection cameras on bridge to count pedestrians. They've been collecting the data for past few years. Burrard bridge during good weather days, has 4,000 cyclists daily, Cambie has 2,000 cyclists and Granville 500. These other bridges are within 2-3 blocks away parallel to this bridge, as alternate and currently UNDERUTILIZED bridges by cars.

Cyclists have been advised by the local cycling advocacy organization not to allow themselves to become confrontational in behaviour with the bridge car drivers.

My partner has been interviewed by 5 different tv, newspaper and radio outlets within past 2 days. His name was given in press releases as 1 of the representatives for Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition. Other people were not in town this weekend, etc.

Some pics this afternoon of a group ride I joined in support of bridge lane ride where later, we had some cake at end of bridge, chat-up with other cyclists. There was 1 motorist that screamed at us but many cyclists off the path and eating cake, waved pleasantly to him.
Child that you see was followed closely by the father (which you cannot see). She was gamely pumping up the small bridge grade. Her father is one of the paid staff members for local cycling advocacy organization.
I’m in the high-visibility jacket cycling, last pic taken this evening.
This morning, I was unaware that Grog joined up with group for bridge ride when I flew by, going somewhere else for a meeting. Kudos, for using the bridge lane!


Quote from an article today on the political importance of this event. It really does feel like another major historic event for cycling facility design in Vancouver. It has high media and public visibility because bridge is located downtown. We knew of cycling friend/advocate who cycled 100 kms. round trip from the suburbs for celebratory bridge bikelane lst day! The mayor, Gregor Robertson is a regular bike commuter himself and has biked over this bridge regularily for past several years. He is interviewed in some of the bike tv clips. He is same mayor and his council who wanted and now has, the front lawn of city hall, dug up for veggie/community garden. So you can see it being nurtured ..now when you visit city hall. Best use of space..for the community, that any city hall could organize.

It's only a kilometre of pavement.
But that kilometre – Burrard Bridge and the approaches on either end – has become Vancouver's grand and most controversial symbol for the war on climate change as it experiments with taking a lane of the bridge away from the internal-combustion engine and giving it to cyclists.
And, along with that, it's also the new city council's most significant political gamble.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1217113/
http://www.ctvbc.ctv.ca/ (a different weblink to be given in 24 hrs. after it’s digitally archived)
http://www.globaltv.com/globaltv/bc/...tml?id=1786163


Whatever your local community does...don't give up. Offer convenient alternate routes for car drivers if they perceive congestion, although there may not be.

Your local media might still report in a biased way. But cycling community and city council need to continuously give objective, statistical info. of past, current and future usage volumes by cyclists, vehicles and pedestrians.