A protected bike lane on West King Edward Avenue through Vancouver’s Dunbar neighbourhood was cancelled at the last minute, after local opponents complained of improper consultation and alleged safety risks.
Instead, the city will pivot to an unprotected design for the four-block gap between Dunbar Street and Quesnel Drive. This painted lane will place cyclists in between arterial traffic and parking—despite the city’s own policy stating that bikes on “busy streets with lots of cars should be separated from motor vehicle traffic whenever possible”.
What was there before?
As the only primary arterial between Broadway and 41st Avenue, King Edward Avenue has long been identified by the City of Vancouver as a potential bike route, offering a more direct alternative to the circuitous and hilly 29th Avenue local street bikeway.
However, in a familiar Vancouver story, only bits and pieces of the aspirational corridor have been built: a painted, unprotected lane between Angus Dr and Quesnel Dr through Arbutus Ridge and an orphaned one-block section between Yukon St and Columbia St that dead-ends in someone’s front yard.
Because there is no bike lane of any kind on King Edward west of Quesnel Drive, cyclists who are trying to access Dunbar Village, Pacific Spirit Park or UBC are left with few good options: they can ride in the “door zone” next to cars and buses, or they can take a circuitous detour by either going four blocks south to 29th Avenue or seven blocks north to 18th Avenue.
What was the City of Vancouver proposing?
Since 2022, the City of Vancouver has been upgrading the sewer system under West King Edward Ave between Dunbar Street and Quesnel Drive. The work, which required digging up and repaving the pavement on both sides of the median, created an opportunity to redesign the road to include cycling facilities.
Under existing city policy, staff are directed to “incorporate separated bicycle facilities into the design and construction of all new major roads”. To fulfill this objective, the city proposed a parking-protected design that uses on-street parking to separate cyclists from street traffic.
As a result, the design would have preserved most of the on-street parking, though there is some reduction on the hilly block west of Collingwood St. Since King Edward currently only has a single extra-wide driving lane, the bike lane also would not have impacted the road capacity.
What is a parking-protected bike lane?
A parking-protected bike lane is a bike lane that is separated from traffic by a row of street parking. Because the design only relocates parking away from the curb, it is cheap to build, fast to implement, and avoids the street parking concerns that are a hallmark of bike lane debates.
Parking-protected bike lanes are generally considered an “all ages and abilities” (AAA) design that most cyclists would find comfortable, though this depends on the design of the specific implementation.
Some potential issues include reduced visibility at intersections—which are a risk with all types of bike lanes and can be resolved through intersection daylighting—as well as the danger of being doored by cars, which can be mitigated by painting a buffer between the parking and the bike lane.
Others have expressed fears that parking-protected bike lanes can result in people being hurt by bikes while exiting their cars. It is worth remembering that serious pedestrian-cyclist collisions are quite rare, and that any potential increase is far dwarfed by the well-documented reduction in pedestrian injuries as a result of the traffic calming effects of bike lanes (in New York, injuries fell 40-50% for all road users, not just cyclists).
What are opponents saying, and are they right?
Opponents of the parking-protected bike lane circulated a Change.org petition claiming that the design was “unsafe”. Key points in the petition are that “cyclists will have no escape route” if there is a hazard in the bike lane, that narrowing the travel lane will increase “sideswiping” of parked cars, and that the design is confusing because it’s to the left of the parking lane on some blocks and to the right on others.
These arguments are not founded in fact.
Claims that protected bike lanes ‘trap’ cyclists by denying them room to manoeuvre in an emergency have dogged projects for decades, despite the total lack of evidence. These claims fail to acknowledge that buffering cyclists from car traffic markedly reduces the likelihood of an emergency happening in the first place, and that the biggest threat to cyclists on the roads is being hit by a car: a 2015 City of Vancouver report noted that 47% of all cyclist injuries over the past eight years were due to collision with a motor vehicle. In fact, a peer-reviewed study of parking-protected bike lanes in Vancouver and Ottawa found that on average they reduced total collisions by over 30%.
The claim that narrowing the road will increase “sideswiping” is even more cryptic. Putting aside the fact that narrowing travel lanes decreases average speeds and reduces both the frequency and severity of car crashes, this argument implies that it is more desirable for errant drivers to strike cyclists in a painted bike lane than a row of generally unoccupied parked cars. As HUB Vancouver/UBC Local Committee Co-Chair Anthony Floyd points out, this is effectively “bike-protected parking”.
The petition also makes the argument that the number of points on King Edward where the bicycle lane switches between left and right of the parking lane will result in danger through inconsistency. By this logic, a consistent painted bike lane left of the parking lane should be among the safest types of cycling infrastructure, yet studies repeatedly show that such designs do nothing to improve safety—and indeed may be more dangerous than if no bike lane existed at all.
Finally, the petition objects to the lack of consultation around the original parking-protected design. Ironically, the process by which this design was scrapped proven even more opaque, as nobody outside of a handful of blocks in Dunbar had any input on whether they supported evidence-based, protected cycling infrastructure on King Edward—a particularly baffling choice given how important safe east–west routes are for long-distance bike commuters (e.g., to UBC).
What comes next?
Line-painting on King Edward has been suspended until spring due to poor weather. When it resumes, the city has announced that it will be painting an unprotected bike lane directly adjacent to arterial traffic and keeping street parking curbside.
The city claims that the updated lane “will provide dedicated space for people cycling”, but makes no mention of how this demonstrably dangerous design will do anything to advance its aspirations of turning King Edward into a complete street.
While it is not known at this moment whether the impetus for the scrapped design came from staff or council, it underscores the current city administration’s lack of regard for the safety of vulnerable road users and its inability to build even the most basic and evidence-proven infrastructure in the face of any local opposition.
Anyone interested in voicing their opinions about this decision can write to city staff at wkingedward@vancouver.ca.
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