Article content continued

Lon LaClaire, the city’s director of transportation, said West 10th Avenue has become heavily-used by cyclists and drivers alike, and while he wants to put a stop to through-traffic, he sees moving cyclists to a different route as a non-starter.

“We have had some questions about diverting cyclists off of 10th, but we don’t see that as a practical option,” he said. “The nearby streets are actually arterial. That’s Broadway and that’s 12th Avenue. It would be very difficult for us, without having big impacts on general traffic or transit reliability, to build separated bike facilities on those streets.”

Besides, LaClaire said, even if the city did reroute the bike lane, many cyclists would still take 10th Ave., the most direct route with a flat grade.

Despite the loss of parking spaces to the new bike lanes, LaClaire said there could soon be more parking than ever before in the area — if Vancouver Coastal Health agrees to turn undeveloped land it owns at the corner of 10th Ave. and Ash Street into a 116-plus space street-level lot. If not, there’s always plenty of other off-street parking lots, he reasoned. This is a key argument that staff have played up in public consultation material they’ve prepared for what they expect to be their final round of consultation.

Of the area’s 4,400 parking spaces, just four per cent are on-street metered spots, according to the city. When staff went out last week to count, they found just three of their 173 spots unused at any given time during peak hours. In contrast, some 380 spots sat empty in a handful of surrounding parkades during peak hours, according to a pair of counts in November and December of 2015.