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Looking at all the bike lanes popping up in Vancouver and around the Lower Mainland, it’s hard to remember how controversial the first one, over the Burrard Street Bridge, was when it opened for testing 10 years ago.

But Kevin Quinlan, chief of staff for former mayor Gregor Robertson at the time, remembers.

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“You opened the newspapers or turned on the radio and every day all you heard was it was going to be a failure, a disaster. It got a little ominous,” said Quinlan, now a climate change consultant.

“But not only did no disaster happen, bike lanes have become more successful than we hoped for at the time. ”

On July 13, 2009, a third attempt was made to put a bike lane on the Burrard Bridge, after two previous false starts. (A scheduled six-month trial in 1996 lasted one week and a proposed trial in 2006 never came to be after a new council was elected.)

As Quinlan recently tweeted, there seemed to be months of “media hysteria that it would be a complete disaster, it would fail. Political opponents tried to get ‘Gregor’s gridlock’ to become a catch slogan (lasted about as long as ‘Who let the dogs out’).”