Article content continued

Which is not to say that a bike lane can’t be done well. When cities actually do their homework (and have the climate and demographics to support a cycle-commuting culture), the results can be admirable. Vancouver, for example, outfitted its downtown core with protected bike lanes, as part of a strategy that successfully increased the flow of people into the city, while cutting down on car trips.

And the results are obvious: the city has a consistent flow of bicycle traffic that includes everyone from besuited lawyers to beachgoing seniors. Once or twice, I’ve been in a Vancouver bike traffic jam so heavy that it’s taken me two light cycles to cross an intersection.

The city has the numbers to back this up, too. Even in bitter, rainy December, City of Vancouver counters logged 44,000 bike trips over the Burrard Bridge bike lane in December 2015 — an average of one bike a minute, 24 hours a day. And the rate quadruples at the height of summer.

But Vancouver is, unfortunately, a bit of a Canadian anomaly. In many places, bike lanes seem to be the lazily researched passion project of some city councillor who just got back from a trip to Amsterdam. Canadian planners have an uncanny ability to gaze out over a snowy landscape of sprawling, highway-connected suburbs and decide that “what this place needs is some bike lanes!”

Case in point: Edmonton. This is a city that has a very low density. It’s frozen and icy half the year. And it’s a pretty blue-collar place, which results in a lot of people needing vehicles for work (you can’t haul a welding rig on the back of a 10-speed).