By Cheryl Jahn

Better bike lanes needed

Jun 28, 2023 | 3:45 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – Cycling around Prince George is not for the faint of heart. While there are designated bike lanes, they are tough to see sometimes. But there is a move afoot to enhance the circuit, with some major deficiencies identified with the current painted lines.

“These bike lanes actually promote vehicles passing closer than if there was no infrastructure at all. So it ends up making it feel more uncomfortable for the vast majority of people,” explains Kyle Ross, Organizer of Safe Biking for Prince George.

“Unfortunately, one of the things you want to ask too is some of the benefits of cycling and if you can highlight some of those, uh, plenty of benefits to cycling, um, of course, it’s exercise, right?”

Avid cyclist and member of the local Cycling Club, Ron Gall says there are a number of pitfalls for cyclists.

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“Just riding over here today. Somebody stopped in a bike lane to talk on the cell phone. Somebody pulls into the bike lane because they got to run into a store really quickly. And what that does is it takes the bike lane that does exist away from the cyclist and put the cyclist in the lane of traffic, which is dangerous.”

But Kyle Ross notes the cycling community is growing in Prince George and there are plenty of bonuses to the practice of cycling. “Of course it’s exercise, right? So, I’ve been doing a lot of that personally, and I’ve been feeling so much better because I’m exercising and it’s great for mental health, it’s great for physical health, it’s great for cardiovascular health. It’s all around a good time,” says Ross.

Gallo has some advice for motorists.

“We’re faster than you think we are. If you think about a road cyclist such as myself, I can maintain speeds. I can get downtown at the same time as a motorist stopping for the same traffic lights that you stop for. But there are electric bikes that are out there right now, and they can maintain those speeds up a hill, down a hill on the flats like they are their ratio for city speed limits.”

Kyle Ross says the City needs to take a page from Vancouver’s playbook when it comes to dedicated bike lanes.

“The City should use a plan from Metro Vancouver, which is called the Rapid Implementation for Bikeways in Metro Vancouver, which uses a specific design of rapid implementation that uses easily movable posts, curbs, etc. to rapidly build out something for a relatively low cost.”

“He’s talking about, we need to get from point A to point B, but there’s a long progression of steps in between there that we can do and can implement every time we’re doing some road work,” says Gallo. “When we’re doing some road work, if we can remember that the cyclists use the roads as well, we’ll be that much further ahead.”

But both recognize that the first line of action is education, both of the motorist and the cyclist.