Sure, Vancouver’s seawall is the popular place to bike, but that doesn’t mean the suburbs can’t be too — with a few fixes.
In the latest episode of the popular About Here video series on urban solutions (180,000 YouTube subscribers and counting), creator Uytae Lee takes a set of two wheels into the land of “cars, cul-de-sacs and Costcos.”
“On the surface, it’s easy to think that cycling would just never be possible in neighbourhoods like this,” he says in the opening, “but the evidence actually suggests that might not be true.”
The obvious problem is that lots of infrastructure is dedicated to cars and that the landscape is too vast.
But Lee challenges us to look again. Wide roads might be built for cars, but they actually make for a roomy cycling experience. Suburbs might be monotonous, but that means everyone’s got schools and shopping close by. And looking at resident surveys from sprawling cities like Surrey, it’s not distance that’s preventing people from hopping on a bike, but worries about safety.
In the video, Lee cycles routes in two cities to sample the experience: Surrey in Metro Vancouver and Saanich on Vancouver Island.
The inner streets of both are lovely and calm, a kind of Spielbergian setting that would be familiar to the cycling kids of E.T. or Stranger Things.
But on the main roads, with cars, buses and trucks? Separation is key to safety.
Surrey’s Fraser Highway has only painted lines to protect cyclists. Lee’s commute here proved treacherous, with drivers and a giant 503 bus speeding right into his lane. (In the words of one YouTube commenter: “Uytae out here taking his life in his hands cycling Fraser Highway to deliver premium About Here content.”)
In Saanich, on the other hand, cyclists on the main road are protected by a physical barrier. The path even feeds into the Galloping Goose Regional Trail, once a freight railway built during the First World War and now a green and picturesque cycling route that takes you from the suburbs into Victoria.
Paying for this infrastructure and finding the political support for it can be difficult, though, says Lee.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle is to accept that there’s no such thing as a natural place for cars. A good cycling network can happen even in the suburbs, offering people another option to get around.
“Our cities don’t have to look like Amsterdam or Copenhagen to be good for cycling,” says Lee.
Check out the video above for About Here’s usual mix of data, snappy solutions, and Lee’s delightfully geeky passion for improving our cities.
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Christopher Cheung is a reporter at The Tyee, where this story originally appeared.
