It's high time to welcome cyclists in Kitsilano Park
Make it truly `accessible to all,' says
How is it possible that the most popular recreational activity in Vancouver (next to walking) is discouraged in our parks?
How is it possible that an activity that is enthusiastically promoted in numerous city plans and streets is not seen as a priority inside our parks?
How is it possible that an activity that reduces traffic congestion, toxic air, pedestrian injuries, and unpleasant noise is seen as a threat to park users?
What is it about cycling through Kits Park that triggers neighbourhood “uprisings,” talkshow vitriol, and a bully mob that scared the park board from making a decision in 2018?
The safe passage of cyclists westward from Vanier Park through Hadden Park and Kitsilano Park to the separated Seaside Greenway at Trafalgar Street may not seem like a priority in a city overwhelmed by inequality, tent cities and COVID lockdowns. But this unfinished section is a symbolic stick in the spokes of the world's longest uninterrupted seaside greenway, the top recreational amenity in the city.
Routing elderly cyclists onto unprotected streets shared with cars east and west of the park — through a big, busy restaurant-tennis-beachgoer parking lot in the middle of the park, forcing them to dodge streams of pedestrians, then navigate a muddy dirt single track — is an abysmal failure to live up to the purported All Ages and Abilities (AAA) label on this route.
This west-side flashpoint somehow has become a blinking red light slowing down cyclist safety in other parks. Fearful trepidation about creating a permanent bike lane through Stanley Park is just one echo of the Kits Park blockade, even as the evidence screams “these changes work.” The city's quick repurposing of Beach Avenue has turned it into Canada's, likely North America's, busiest bike route, a happy place for seniors, kids, mobility scooters and the sometimes annoying Lycra crowd.
This west-side flashpoint ... has become a blinking red light slowing down cyclist safety in other parks.
To be fair, the Vancouver park board is promising to build a safe cycling route through Kits Park a year from now, amid election jitters. That's almost 10 years after earlier plans were shouted down by a group best described as the Hadden Park Defence Militia (officially the Kits Point Residents Association). Yet park board staff and elected park board officials — including the green-professing majority — still are terrified of this group, continuing to hold the city's exploding numbers of pandemic-driven cyclists hostage to its anti-cycling demands.
That's what irks so many people who have tried so hard for so many years to come up with solutions that actually work for all Kits Park users. Workable options are on the table, city council deemed this a priority project in 2014, but little has budged in this neighbourhood since park board staff wiped the spit off their face from residents incensed about opening Point Grey Road to users other than arterial car traffic in 2013-14.
Meanwhile, the world moves on — on bikes. The CBC reports that 42 out of the 94 largest European cities have built new pandemic cycling networks, and more than 400 kilometres of them are permanent. More Canadians are now biking or walking to work than using public transit.
Families from outside the privileged confines of Kits Point are cycling to Kits Park in greater numbers. A park board survey in late fall 2020 found that 70 per cent of almost 11,000 respondents wanted more road space dedicated to cyclists in Stanley Park. A supposedly anti-bike petition has 35,000 signatures in favour of keeping Stanley Park “open and accessible to all.” Cyclists agree!
Cycling, especially as e-bikes empower the less-abled and climate change pushes us out of our cars, is only going to grow in cities and in parks.
Kitsilano Park's infection of the lifeblood of the city's safe-cycling infrastructure needs to be healed now.
Let's do it with kindness, calmness, and a focus on safety, but inject it, please, with a long-overdue sense of urgency.