If you have safe lanes, people will cycle

“If you build it, they will come,” goes the popular saying.

But is that true for bike lanes, in a community where fewer than one per cent of trips happen on a bicycle?

The City of Kitchener recently revealed it wants to spend $600,000 to continue encouraging people to cycle, mostly by building better, safer bike lanes.

If successful, the city will pay 20 per cent of the cost, while the remaining 80 per cent will come from the province’s cap-andtrade carbon tax. (That’s the extra money we’ve all been paying for gasoline and home heating fuel, which must go into environmentally-friendly projects.)

The city’s main ambition is to build a bike lane on Wilson Avenue between Traynor Avenue and Wabanaki Drive.

This would close an important gap in the cycling routes now available. It would connect Conestoga College, industrial workplaces and south Kitchener residential neighbourhoods with the transportation hub at Fairview Park Mall, including light rail transportation to downtown cores and both universities.

Right now Wilson Avenue doesn’t have bike lanes, and it’s extremely intimidating to cycle on.

“It’s a very high-volume road with high speeds” of traffic, said Danny Pimentel, who is the city’s manager of active transportation planning.

It’s cheap, but dangerous, to simply paint a line on a road like this to designate a bike lane. It’s more expensive, but safer, to physically separate the bike lane using “flexposts” or building a concrete barrier to protect the cyclists.

Pimentel makes a compelling case for the more expensive lanes, even if that means narrowing the vehicle traffic to one lane from two in some places.

A minority of the people who travel by bicycle are comfortable speeding along right next to heavy traffic. But the “vast majority aren’t,” he said.

If cities are going to increase

the number of cyclists, and decrease car travel, they need to encourage the nervous people who want to cycle by providing a safe space for them to do it. Cities have done that locally, with trails and bike lanes amounting to 200 km in Kitchener alone.

There have been some mistakes, like bike lanes that needlessly took away parking spots on wide, empty residential streets, and like the

mostly-disregarded “sharrows” in downtown areas. (In these areas, vehicles are supposed to let the cyclist take the whole lane, but they don’t.)

But overall, a lot of good work has been done. Yet the car is still king, accounting for more than 87 per cent of travel in this region. Cycling, meanwhile, is even less popular than walking.

Despite that, Canadians are optimistic. Forty-four per cent say they would cycle more if they felt safer on roads, according to a survey this year from the Canadian Automobile Association. Nearly twothirds of Canadians think we will soon see more cyclists on the road, and 63 per cent support more investment in cycling infrastructure.

If the city gets the funding that it has applied for, it will be required to measure the number of cyclists on that route before and after the lanes are built. That’s the nail-biter in this whole story. Will the trails, lanes, sharrows and fancy bike racks actually get more people out of their cars and onto bikes?

They haven’t so far. Only one per cent of trips are made by bicycle in this region, and that statistic hasn’t changed since 1996. Results for the 2016 census are expected in November. Let’s hope for the best.