They are not putting the brakes on the idea of bike lanes, but Victoria councillors want to ensure everyone is pedalling in the same direction when its cycling network meets Cook Street Village.
As part of the Fairfield Neighbourhood Plan work now underway, councillors have directed staff to have an urban designer work with interested parties to develop conceptual drawings of the village area with different bike network options.
That could open the door to new ideas — such as using a “woonerf” or complete streets concept. Cyclists, pedestrians and motorists could be given equal priority and share the roadway, rather than having separated bike lanes running on either side of the road.
Mayor Lisa Helps said the work will not land on a preferred suggestion for the bike lanes but will instead be a conceptual look at a future Cook Street Village.
“Bike lanes are part of it, but that’s not the thrust. Sidewalks are part of it. Street trees are part of it. Gathering spaces are part of it. The street wall of buildings is part of it,” Helps said.
“This isn’t a bike exercise — it’s a village exercise.”
Still, bike lanes dominated much of the discussion at a three-hour Fairfield Neighbourhood Plan workshop this week.
Separated bike lanes aren’t scheduled to be built in Cook Street Village until 2021 or 2022, but there has been significant pushback to the idea.
Merchants worry about the impact of parking and loading zone loss on their businesses. Residents have expressed concerns about the additional pressure on already limited parking on side streets and others predict a traffic nightmare as the street is squeezed for the lanes.
Anxiety runs so high that some people think the lanes will be built next week, said Coun. Chris Coleman, council liaison to the neighbourhood.
“The clearer we can be in sharing with the public what the timelines actually are, we can ramp that angst down,” he said.
The city completed the first leg of its planned bike network — a 1.2-kilometre, two-way bike lane down Pandora Avenue — last year at a cost of $3.42 million. The second leg — a two way bike lane on Fort Street between Wharf and Cook streets is now under construction at a budgeted $3.27 million.
Coun. Geoff Young said there are lessons to be learned from those projects — one being that it is reasonable for merchants to want to have an idea of what could be coming.
“I think the biggest thing we’ve learned is that these big lanes are really a big deal,” Young said.
“Every day that those fences and that strip of gravel stays in front of those stores on Fort Street, it’s becoming a bigger deal, and no business can possibly lend support or opposition … without knowing what is going to be happening.”
Developing village concepts with different cycling options is a reasonable compromise, he said.
Coun. Ben Isitt noted that council approved the bike network, including a stretch through the Cook Street Village, in 2015 and paid about $500,000 to get detailed conceptual designs of the entire network.
“We already have conceptual designs for Cook Street Village. That’s what we paid for,” he said. “So to say this process won’t even do that, it seems we’re turning back the clock by even more than three and a half years.”
There has already been extensive consultation on the plans, he said, and council should be trying to move closer to a consensus on the existing designs.
Phase one of the 32-kilometre bike network is 5.4 kilometres of bike tracks downtown:
• Protected two-way bike lanes on Pandora Avenue and Fort Street between Cook and Wharf streets.
• Protected two-way bike lanes on the west side of Wharf between the Johnson Street Bridge and Government Street.
• Protected two-way bike lanes on the south side of Humboldt Street between Government and Douglas streets, and shared road use between Douglas and Cook.
• One-way protected bike lanes on both sides of Cook Street between Pandora and Pakington Street.
