Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­

Cycling is a polarizing topic in Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­politics. Business owners expressed concerns over the Hornby Street separated bike lane, but saw it proceed anyway; Kitsilano residents protested a shared bike and pedestrian route through Hadden Park and were successful. Love it or hate it, there’s no question that our political representatives’ stand on bikes and cycling infrastructure will influence many people as they go to the polls on Saturday.

Against the backdrop of the civic election, I’d like to draw attention to what I personally consider an extremely worthwhile campaign: #ungapthemap.

The campaign (hashtag included) is run by HUB, and the concept is pretty simple. On the , there are grey lines and pink lines. The grey lines are bike routes, either fully separated or designated side streets. The pink lines are the missing connections, places where either no bike route exists or the designated route does not allow for safe cycling. 

A few things jump out when I look at this map.

Firstly, those of us who live in certain areas have it pretty good. The dense network of grey lines through the cities of Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­and Burnaby, for example, speak to the all of the cycling advocacy work and infrastructure improvement that have happened in these areas in recent years.

Secondly, some of these gaps are quite significant. Take, for example, the little pink line on Kent Road, a busy street parallel to Marine Drive that skirts the north bank the Fraser River from Granville to Boundary. This is a beautiful, relatively new piece of cycling infrastructure that connects Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­and Richmond — over the Canada Line bikeway and bridge — and yet there remains this hole in the network that makes approaching it a very daunting thing for a cyclist who isn’t comfortable sharing the road with transport trucks though the industrial neighbourhood.

Thirdly, some of these gaps wouldn’t be all that hard to fix. They don’t require a fully separated bike lane or the closure of a road to all but local vehicle traffic, like the controversial extension of the Seaside bike route on Point Grey Road. They just require designating a street as a bike primary route, much like the heavily used Adanac and East Eighth Avenue bike routes in Vancouver.

HUB has three designated priority areas for closing the gaps: connecting the Port Mann Bridge and Coquitlam Centre in New West, creating north-south connections in central Burnaby, and connecting south Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal and the U.S. border crossing. I support all of these, with a particular personal bias toward the ferry connection. This highly congested vehicle route would greatly benefit from getting people out of cars and onto their bikes.

I would also like to see those smaller, localized gaps on streets like Kent Road addressed. These short stretches of unfriendly, vehicle-heavy road, with no designated space for bikes, are exactly the kind of thing that dissuades new and unfamiliar cyclists from commuting. Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­has seen a tremendous increase in trips taken by bicycle in the past few years — imagine how much that could increase if those pink lines turned grey.

Kay Cahill is a cyclist and librarian who believes bikes are for life, not just for commuting. Reach her at [email protected].