Buried deep inside the 2026 austerity budget, the City of Vancouver has seemingly dropped plans to remove part of the Beach Avenue bike lane and restore two-way traffic between Denman St and Stanley Park.
The fate of the scheme has been in limbo since July 2024 when the Park Board rejected it, leaving it with an unclear path forward. Park Board consent was required because the plan called for the removal of the on-street bike lane on Beach Avenue and its relocation into park land at English Bay Beach, at an estimated cost of $6 million.
In the budget approved yesterday by council, an updated capital plan removed a $4.5 million allocation for the widening of Beach Avenue, which appears to kill the project for the remainder of the 2023–26 capital planning cycle.
The Beach Ave bike lane and its discontents
The Beach Avenue bike lane was created in 2020 as a COVID-era measure to decrease crowding on the seawall. The road was converted to westbound-only vehicle traffic and the eastbound lane was turned into a separated bike lane.
The bike lane was an immediate hit: according to city data, 14,000 cyclists used it daily in 2021, making it Vancouver’s most popular bike lane a year after its creation. In a 2020 city survey, 90% of respondents felt positively about the bike lane and a majority strongly opposed restoring two-way traffic on Beach Avenue.
However, support was not unanimous, with some West End residents forming the A Beach for Everyone advocacy group to lobby for its removal. The group’s social media appears to be dormant since 2023, except for a single retweet in 2024 of an anti-vaccination conspiracy video posted by a group run by now-US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Other groups opposed to the bike lane’s impact on car circulation along Beach Avenue include some Stanley Park drivers and tour bus operators, who decry the lack of a “second exit” from the park. This is despite the fact that it has been possible to exit Stanley Park through Nelson, Barclay and Robson Streets since 2023.
Sarah Kirby-Yung’s $6 million road widening scheme
After the 2022 election, opponents of the Beach Avenue bike lane found a champion in ABC councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung who, unprompted, asked staff during a capital plan implementation update in 2023 to consider restoring two-way car traffic on the road.
During the meeting, Kirby-Yung claimed that “some people are concerned it’s backed up with park access” and went on to suggest that the Beach Avenue bike lane was bad for the environment because it increased idling by cars—a debunked talking point often used to oppose safe cycling infrastructure.
Facing backlash after the meeting, Kirby-Yung backtracked on Twitter, acknowledging the popularity of the Beach Avenue bike lane and promising that “its [sic] not going anywhere”.
This would change in 2024 when staff unveiled the Imagine West End Waterfront Vision, a master park and transportation plan to redevelop the West End beaches. The ambitious 30-year vision called for a sweeping redesign of English Bay Park to adapt to sea level rise and climate change, while proposing new amenities such as a theatre, a skate park and a welcome centre.
However, guided by council feedback, it also suggested restoring two-way traffic between Denman St and Stanley Park on Beach Avenue. To preserve the cycling link into Stanley Park, the plan called for building a replacement bike lane on the adjacent park land. All told, staff estimated that it would cost $6 million to add a net-zero amount of mileage to the cycling network to accommodate cars leaving Stanley Park.
In April 2024, the Park Board enthusiastically endorsed the overall vision, with councillors in the independent majority praising the climate and amenity elements. However, they had concerns about the Beach Avenue scheme and voted along party lines to reject moving forward with the bike lane removal and send it back to staff for further study.
In May, Kirby-Yung moved an amendment at city council to spite the Park Board and approve the exact opposite of what they endorsed, rejecting the entire park plan but moving forward with the Beach Avenue road widening. Killing the park plan was approved along party lines with all of ABC in favour (including then-ABC councillor Rebecca Bligh), though Bligh dissented from the specific line about two-way traffic on Beach Ave.
Returning to the Park Board in July in a game of jurisdictional ping-pong, the Board refused to endorse council’s roadway plan or to allow its staff to work with Vancouver’s engineering department on designing the replacement path on park land. The Park Board was backed by over 290 letters in opposition, mobilized with the help of OneCity, the r/vancouvercycling subreddit, and now-councillor Lucy Maloney.
After the vote, Mayor Ken Sim lashed out at the Park Board, writing that the rejection was a “temporary” setback and vowing to revisit the issue once the province abolished the Park Board at his request.
Rare silver lining in an austerity budget
The removal of funding from the capital plan appears to be an admission by the city that there is no path forward for the removal of the Beach Avenue bike lane, with the Province in no hurry to abolish the Park Board.
While the bike lane removal could come back later, any future capital plan would need to be approved by the next council after the 2026 election.
Beach Avenue thus appears to be a rare silver lining in an otherwise devastating city budget that is expected to slash hundreds of jobs, hike user fees at community spaces, and savage the city’s arts and culture scene.
Leave a Reply