Bike project will balkanize Cook Street

Re: “Another $3 million needed to complete Victoria bicycle lanes,” Dec. 7.

So, the cost of the remaining (for now) downtown (sort of) bicycle lanes has almost tripled from the first estimate. So what?

Look what we get for our money. Humboldt Street will now lead cyclists through increasing narrow and densely populated residential streets, around a new, ridiculously elongated roundabout at the threeway intersection of Humboldt, Vancouver and Pakington, and on to the yellow brick road of Cook Street.

But not the Cook Street of today — now one of the city’s major downtown arteries, with four traffic lanes bringing people, goods, moving vans, buses and emergency vehicles into and out of downtown, the Cook Street village, Beacon Hill Park and the Dallas Road waterfront.

Nope. The new Cook will be two vehicle lanes bracketed by one-way bike paths, with cyclists whizzing past a Berlin Wall of bumper-to-bumper traffic that divides, balkanizes and frustrates the community. What’s not to like about that?

As for the cost, don’t sweat the big stuff. If you look really, really closely, you can see that all of this will be done, according to the new and reliable estimates, for just under $3 a millimetre. And that’s just to complete downtown. Think of the millions of millimetres left to conquer. Robert McConnell Victoria