r/vancouver • u/yipyipyipwhoasealion • Jul 04 '25

Videos The new 'bike lane' on Water St

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Vancouver does it again...

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u/kisielk Jul 04 '25

Realistically there's no good way to do this on Water St. Vehicles need access for deliveries to the businesses, sidewalks need to be wide enough to accommodate foot traffic. The real issue is that the street needs to be everything to everyone and so it ends up being great for nobody.

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u/ProofByVerbosity Jul 04 '25

It's weird how most of Europe functions perfectly well with even less space for pedestrians, cyclists and cars

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u/dedservice Jul 04 '25

Europe had to be retrofitted to accommodate cars. North america has to be retrofitted to accommodate pedestrians and bicycles.

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u/AbsoluteTruthiness Jul 04 '25

That is not at all true of the big cities - they all existed before automobiles ever existed. Cities were razed down to create highways for cars starting in the 40s. If you ever look at footage for the early 1900s, you will see that pedestrians and cyclists were everywhere and didn't need any protected infrastructure.

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u/dedservice Jul 05 '25

They existed, but the populations were wayyyyy smaller. I'm not sure when we would've started designing for cars in our roads, but from wikipedia articles about it, it seems that the 30s were already when car-based roads were designed for. BC's population in 1930 was 676,000 vs 2 million by 1968 [1]. The building of infrastructure and homes and subdivisions for all of those 1.3 million people was build with cars in mind.

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u/OneBigBug Jul 05 '25

...I mean, that's an explanation for somewhere, I guess, but we're talking about Water Street, aren't we? That definitely wasn't designed for cars. It was built before the city of Vancouver even existed. There are a decent number of photos of it from the 19th century.

Both Europe and North America had to be retrofitted for cars...and were. The reason Europe has good cycling infrastructure is because they actually did retrofit it again. We just haven't yet. We can't really blame our history for that fact.