Cycling around Prince George could soon be easier and safer. At Monday’s meeting, council will consider a report recommending that the city end parking in bike lanes.
Councillor Jillian Merrick proposed the original motion that triggered the report. She says allowing parking in bike lanes defeats their purpose.
“I can’t think of another city that has bike lanes that allows unfettered parking in them. A bike lane, just like a car lane, is designed for the movement of vehicles, so if there’s parking in it, it really doesn’t function as a laneway. It just creates a really dangerous situation to put obstacles in a bike lane, especially obstacles that have doors that can swing out without much notice.”
She says a bike lane parking ban has been a long time coming.
“It’s a long standing demand of the cycling community because bike lanes just don’t function very well when there’s vehicles parked in them and it was a big part of the Active Transportation Plan that the city completed a number of years ago. So it’s just a long standing item that needs to be taken care of.”
Merrick says the report is the result of extensive community consultation.
“We hired a consultant to go out and do community engagement with the people and businesses that live on bike routes and figure out where some of the critical problems might be. They’re presented this recommendation [to] remove parking along 69 of the 72 kilometers they evaluated.”
The report proposes not removing parking in bike lanes along two sections of Ospika Boulevard – between 15th and 22nd Avenues, as well as 5th and 10th – and along 15th Avenue between Ospika and Highway 97 and 10th Ave between Burden and McBride. But even these areas will see steps taken to protect cyclists.
“There will be changes in that there will be signage and better street marking so that both cyclists and drivers know that the space is shared and they need to be watching out for each other.”
Merrick says she’s hopeful her fellow councillors will adopt the report’s recommendations.
“This report is based on the feedback of the user groups along those roadways and all of the different areas and justifications are made along the troubling sections that people have identified. So it’s not just a pie in the sky engineering document.”
You can read the full report here.