Victoria city councillors look to speed up bike-lane project

Victoria hopes to accelerate construction of its cycling network — completing 24 kilometres of bike lanes by 2022, a year earlier than projected.

Council has directed staff to report back on the resource implications of the new timetable. It would mean completion of the network within two council terms, said Mayor Lisa Helps.

“I’d love this built sooner. I think realistically 2022 is a good deadline. We’ll see the disruption, but we’ll also see the benefits. And the sooner we can start seeing those benefits — economic, health and environmental — the better.”

Coun. Ben Isitt argued the city should be moving even faster, but his suggestion staff report on the resource implications of aiming for completion by 2020 failed to get support.

Isitt called it a “social justice issue,” saying the 2022 completion sequence favours richer neighbourhoods such as Fairfield and Rockland. He noted council initially hoped to have the network completed by 2018.

“There are some people in Fernwood and North Park who will be touched by the Pandora bike lane, but for most people living in the lower-income, northern half of the city — Oaklands, Hillside-Quadra, Burnside-Gorge and many parts of Fernwood — they really are going to have trouble even getting to this network if we stick with the current phasing,” he said.

Others argued that moving too fast on construction puts at risk public support for the project, which has been criticized for stripping away parking in the downtown and in commercial areas like the Cook Street Village.

Coun. Geoff Young said the schedule is reasonable and allows for public input and for council to learn as it goes.

“It’s going to be tough enough to get support for carrying this through to completion without having the added burden of having people feel that we are trying to ram it through at an unduly high rate of speed,” Young said.

Coun. Marianne Alto called the 2022 deadline “fairly aggressive” and agreed that public buy-in is important.

“The sense of also giving people time to see it and to use it and to ask questions and to provide input and feedback and help us make each phase of it a little bit better than the one before — that is all in my view compromised somewhat by us accelerating it too quickly,” she said.

The project aims to create a network of protected cycling lanes that are safe for cyclists of all ages and abilities.

The current schedule calls for the downtown network to be completed by 2018 with connections to Fairfield-Gonzales, Fernwood, Hillside-Quadra, North Park, Oaklands, Rockland and Victoria West in 2019; Burnside in 2020; North Jubilee and South Jubilee in 2021; and James Bay in 2022.

Construction of the first twoway, 1.2-kilometre separated bike lane on Pandora Avenue between Store and Cook streets is underway and scheduled to open this spring at a cost of $3.4 million.

Work on a similar two-way separated bike lane on the north side of Fort Street between Wharf and Cook streets, estimated to cost $2 million, is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of this year.