Sophie: You can have them all you want after you pay for your Annual Bike License of $150 you do not expect to pay less than dogs do you, Pay for your Access Fee to the area you want to ride in say Stanley Park, Pay Tolls to enter the bike lanes on all Bridges and Viaducts, Pay for Parking of your Bike with meters they have for Cars. the only thing differ will be that you can use your pennies to pay.

Us cyclists should have dedicated bike lanes!!!!!

What stops people from driving bikes downtown? Some reasons could be: too far to commute by bike, fear of sharing the road with cars, fear of having your bike stolen, inconvenience and weather. So attack each of these problems 1 by 1. (These are simplistic solutions, but they could spark some further discussion and improvements)

1. Commuting by bike is not feasible to most who come in from the suburbs, so the best solution to this problem is better transit and more support for businesses to set up in the suburbs where people live.

2. Regarding sharing the road - if you make some downtown roads two lanes both ways with no street parking you would improve bike safety. The inner lane becomes a dedicated bus and bike lane and nobody who bikes on that road will need to worry about having car doors opening into them from parked cars.

3. Eliminate the fear of having your bike stolen by offering a bike service similar to Zip Cars. For a very small subscription fee (it would need to be small and the service would probably need to be subsidized - take some money from the horrible parking fees we pay!), be able to take a bike and use it, drop it off at your destination and not have to worry about it. The bikes could be visually distinct (so everyone would know what bikes were in the system) and work on a key system - have a system key and the bike works. No key, and the wheels don't turn. Have enough of these bikes around town and everyone will use them, eliminating having drug addicts stealing bikes for money since the illegal bike market would decrease.

4. Inconvenience... hard to think up a solution to this one. Given improvements to both transit (point 1 above) and bike availability (point 3 above) perhaps this would be enough for most people to overcome their lethargy.

5. Weather - can't do much about this, but you could have covered bike paths I suppose. The bike route under the Skytrain could fairly easily be covered, and putting a covered bike path down Arbutus (where the train tracks are right now [cummon guys, get the land and use it for something useful!]) could meet this criteria.

Anyways, some ideas off the top of my head.

Please could you make the bike routes more user friendly for cyclists by restricting the movement of cars along these routes. I understand that a portion of cars need to park in front of their homes but some cars cruise along for blocks. It's very unpleasant and discouraging to breath the exhaust fumes and also have a car or truck right behind you waiting for you to pull over to let them by. This is especially true when biking uphill e.g. along 8th between Alma/Blanca.

A major problem about this process of going green is that public is simply not ready for it. It is going to take lot of work, cost and even pain. We Canadians are simply not that sturdy a bunch. There should be no real basis for this surprised expressed by you about my outlook which should not be characterized as negative. Being a clinician gives me the objectivity that is needed here to come as close to truth as possible. I am capable of extreme objectivity which is the real trouble and being misread as negativity. It makes no sense to simply keep dreaming of going green when at the end of the day we are not going to be able to make any real change at all. After it is conceded that we do not expect that everyone will switch to biking for their mode of transportation, the next question is how would Vancouverites really commute. Recreational biking is not of much significance anyway given its small mileage (or Km-age) that would switch from car to bike, but with population increase and greater transportation needs we would more than make up for any greening we do. If as a bike advocate you take the stance that you do need vast improvements in other areas such as transit as well, that is generous of you. But there are serious pragmatic hurdles to face which all boil down to money. We are effectively broke, and cutting back on every service. How we to solve our financial crisis is where the answer to all our woes lies, and given that we are not even starting to talk of our financial woes, should tell everyone that we are all taking for the sake of talking. Nothing really is about to come out of all this debate. Every group is going to keep advancing its own narrow agenda which is going to clash with the agenda or others. In the end, it is even possible to conclude that all this debate is merely to keep us busy with something or what is called as attention deflection tactic in the political circles.

Wow! I am surprised by Mr.Verma's negetive outlook ; its not like we need to expect that everyone will switch to biking for their mode of transportation. We do need vast improvements in other areas such as transit as well, but improving the infrastructure for possible bikers of all skill levels will be great improvement for this city and will help with the rush hour congestion on public transit. There really is a lot of people striving to live greener lives and anything the city does to help will makes it that much easier for these people to realize their their goals. Ottawa has a great continuous green-way/bike/walk path that can take you directly from the suburbs to the city; and it is beautiful, safe and away from vehicles. As for my request for the biking infrastructure I would like to see green-ways with designated paths that avoid roads as much as possible. I have biked to work in the past and sharing the road with buses ect. is very dangerous, particularly for intermediate and novice cyclists.

:)

We sure are fixated on the bikes as the sole means of making us go green. There are serious limits to what bikes can accomplish for Vancouvrites. Those who commute from Surrey and Coquitlam or farther can never use bikes all the way to work. Too many logistic problems impose serious limits on bikes as our key remedy. Geography alone is a serious hurdle in our tightly packed city.

For trips between 5 and 10 km, a bike is a cheap and effective way to do it. Fitness is really not much of an obstacle for most -- and fitness will improve steadily with each trip you take. The health benefits of cycling are large and immediate, and you don't have to go at it like an Olympic road race to get these benefits. Plus it's a very green way to get around, too.

Vancouver with its fairly steep hills in several areas is not particularly suited for bike commute except for leisure biking around the seawalls etc. So getting people to commute by bike from suburbs is an unrealistic expectation. Transit has myriad of problems of its own. Transportation nightmare is not easy to solve. Plus we just don’t have the funds to invest. Aren't we in a great shape folks? Anyway lets join hands , please attend VSR events http://vsrbc.web.officelive.com

many people who would ride their bikes to work, would ride it in the sun and not the rain...... because of this you should invest in transit before bikes

Greenest City Planning Team seems to be doing a bit fishy job here by becoming a propagandist-lobbyists for bicycles, which have at least two dozen hurdles in its way. It can be seen as an attempt to take more credit that is deserved for having done some work about bike lanes in Vancouver. Even the fittest amongst us would not be able to use bicycle to commute the distances of 30-40Km and still have energy and time left to do the job that needs to be done. While for short distance travel bikes would work out there would remain the need for trains, buses and cars for long distances. And please bear in mind the carbon emissions related to manufacture of bikes, and the infrastructure. We are not yet purely green electricity reliant. I have previously mentioned the fitness catch-22 that precludes a sizable fraction of pubic to use bikes, and there is this issue of parking and thefts. By adding bike lanes and using bikes for moving around we can only do so much greening, in the end we have to cut back on our travel habits seriously. Walking is the way to go. For more going green wisdom visit http://vsrbc.web.officelive.com/

I would just like to second the comment about traffic circles above - they are NOT a safe form of traffic calming, from a cyclist's perspective.

I'm an avid cyclist, but I refuse to use the routes like 10th or Ontario because of the traffic circles. Cars behave idiotically by turning left in front of the traffic circles (instead of going around them). Cars don't know how to behave and wind up behaving erractically and unpredictably, resulting in people getting hurt. They're lethal. Almost all of my friends have been hit by a car at a traffic circle - they're completely unsafe.

Personally, I find it much safer (and faster) to ride on major roads in shared bus/bike lanes. I love the wide bike shoulders on Cambie and Broadway.

@anyomous Great question! The Greenest City Planning team is made up of City staff who are working on the implementation plan for the Greenest City 2020 initiative.

To get this conversation going, we seeded the forum with ideas that we have been considering, ideas put forward in the Greenest City Action Team’s A Bright Green Future report, and ideas from previous engagement activities.

So yes, we are very interested to hear ideas from our residents and will be considering those ideas during our planning process. In the spirit of dialogue we are also very interested to hear what residents think of our ideas. With the ability to propose, comment and vote on ideas, this forum seems like a useful way to have that conversation.

The only way that we will get the everyday Vancouverite to cycle is to not only improve infrastructure but also implement progressive policy AND eliminate mandatory helmet legislation and related fear-tactics (as featured in the recent bike to work weeks).

Who is in the "Greenest City planning team" - Why is the city submitting their own ideas - shouldn't this forum be for residents to tell you what we want?

A serious huddle to bikes, walks and even transit is the pathetically lousy fitness level of Canadians. That is a catch 22 situation because a third of Canadians are now too unfit to even begin a fitness program. That is why it seems that we are not goign to win this battle as we are without fighters now. Its too late already may be??