The upside to cycling in Halifax is that drivers are so scared and confused by bikes, they cut you a wide swath. The con: a lack of infrastructure. Bike lanes are few and scattered, and there’s almost no designated bike parking.
When I bike downtown to a meeting and have to wander the block looking for a parking meter to lock to, it makes me cranky. Steve Bedard, co-chair of the Halifax Cycling Committee, sympathizes with my plight. “It’s a barrier to biking to work,” he says. “If you’re in for a typical eight- to 12-hour workday, downtown Halifax doesn’t offer the volume and safety of parking options.”
And so we see bikes locked pell-mell to trees, handrails and stop signs.
The Halifax Regional Municipality hasn’t prioritized cycling. As a result we have only one staff person responsible for cycling issues, and it’s only part of her job. That person is Hanita Koblents, a transportation-demand management coordinator, and a passionate cyclist making a heroic effort.
Koblents agrees with my assessment of bike parking in the city. “There’s a lot that can be done,” she says. A couple years ago she started buying bike racks and planning locations for them, but when she went on maternity leave the city didn’t replace her. The racks sat in storage for a year.
She’s back in action now and has plenty of ideas. From the time she took the job, Koblents realized that she needed to promote bike parking to businesses. Most business owners don’t realize that bike racks are provided by the city on request. That information is now available in the cycling section of halifax.ca. With a slightly bigger investment, other media could take the message a lot further.
Koblents is busy identifying ideal locations for bike racks downtown and in business areas like Quinpool Road. The Quinpool streetscaping plan hit a hitch when the feds rejected it for funding, but Koblents struck a cost-sharing deal with HRM’s streetscape coordinator, and promises there will soon be “plenty of high-quality, stainless steel bike racks” on Quinpool.
Her plans for downtown, on the other hand, are “held up by my workload. I’d love to a do a survey of biking needs downtown.” Barrington Street, a veritable dead zone for cyclists looking to lock up, presents unique challenges. The narrow sidewalks and rules about pedestrian accessibility to shops leave little room for bike racks.
“And we’re not to interfere with bus stops, parked cars and loading zones.” Cyclists take a back seat. Again.
In January the Halifax Cycling Coalition conducted a survey about the best and worst bike parking spots in Halifax. The big loser was the Halifax Ferry Terminal. Steve Bedard says the results show an opportunity to make the ferry terminal a hub for a healthy mix of walking, cycling and public transit.
When HCC released its survey results, Koblents called Bedard. “She asked what they could do about the situation,” Bedard recalls. Koblents is still planning a site visit, but hopes to replace and relocate the low-grade bike rack.
In recent months, much of Koblents’ time has been focused on Bike Week planning. As in past years, the event will provide cyclists with some overdue pampering: valet parking. “We want to encourage people to take alternative transportation to special events like concerts and the Tall Ships,” Koblents says.
To do so, secure bike parking, en masse, is provided on a temporary basis. Koblents is experimenting with two kinds of bike racks—a massive “glorified sawhorse” and individual stands that lock the bike in an upright position—that can be moved from site to site. They can be staffed by a non-profit organization charging nominal fees as a fundraiser.
Valet parking for cyclists—talk about a pro-cycling Bizarro World! But to create that world beyond Bike Week, Koblents could really use help. She’s excited to be hiring an environmental science student with a community design background for eight hours a week in September.
Bedard thinks the full flip in cyclists’ favour will take more time. “Trends move west to east,” he says. “Biking is huge in Vancouver and Victoria, and we’re late picking up on it.”
Hopefully HRM won’t wait too long to catch on, because when it comes to cycling infrastructure, a small investment goes a long way.
This article appears in May 27 – Jun 2, 2010.
For me, parking downtown is not my main issue. Working at the Maritime Center I have access to bike parking on front step (on the side) and in underground parking for the building. An alternate spot is the parking lot across from the MEC.
My issues are….
1- the biking lane on Brunswick being used by cars as secondary parking lane/passenger drop off zone. This happens in morning between 7:45-8:30 and at night 3:45-5. The end of George is using by courier as parking. The corner of Duke and Brunswick is used as drop off zone (the no parking should be changed to no stopping).
2- how biking lane start and end. I understand why lots cyclists don’t use bike lane. At first, it scared me to get in and out of bike.
3- Getting on and off the bridge. It is stupid that there is a bus stop (on Hfx side) when there is a stop just 20 meters before that. People waiting at the stop get in the way. And there always the question of how to merge into traffic.
I don’t think that Halifax drivers are scared or they don’t understand cyclists, we’re just used to dealing with poor cyclists, who don’t realize that they share the road with cars. Too many cyclists with fixed gear bikes that think that they’re in the middle of downtown Montreal, where congestion makes it a safe place for bicycles.
Car culture in HRM makes sense, unfortunately. We lack density within the city, so as such, because we’re all sprawled out, people simply don’t care to bike to work. We need to get that through our thick skulls. We can always compare ourselves to Victoria, Vancouver, or even the oft-mentioned Montreal, but we lack the density of those cities, and we lack the young people that those cities have. Combine this with the fact that the essential services we all use, like grocery stores or retail centres, are pushed primarily to the outlying areas, so even cycling to places like that is usually out of the question, outside of a seasoned cyclist.
There’s a few things we can do make it easier for cyclists in this city, but a few bike racks and a dedication to more bike lanes isn’t going to fix it. There are significant obstacles that we need to overcome as a city before we even discuss cycling in this city as a priority.
Agree with HRMCycling about the bridge. The way on and off the bridge on Halifax side is seriously stupid. There’s no seamless way to do the Halifax side if you’re coming or going. It is a major deterrent for me. As for bike lanes, I could take them or leave them- what I’d really like to see in Halifax which would making cycling safer is advance stop areas at intersections for cyclists. I loved these when I lived in Europe. They made me feel a lot safer at intersections than bike lanes do generally ever.
It says in the article that businesses can request bike racks from the municipality, but I can’t find the details at halifax.ca. Anybody have any protips for me? My place of work is adjacent to a trail and there’s a lot of cycle traffic on the trail, I’d love for some of them to take a break in here (if only they had somewhere other than our wheelchair ramp to lock their bikes!).
I live a stone’s throw from Bayers Lake (i.e., the Clayton Park area), and I tend to want to bike there because it’s so close. A person would be hard-pressed to find a solitary bike rack in that entire park. I usually end up locking up to a railing or a fence, but it would be nice to have some dedicated racks.
There used to be a rack in front of the Lacewood Drive Canadian Tire, but post-renovation, it seems to have vanished.
Jgoreham: You can find out how to request a bike rack at: http://www.halifax.ca/traffic/documents/Pr….
I was nearly killed this morning on my bike when a van overtook me and then slammed on the breaks to turn right. This morning I left later than usual and the roads were more congested with cars than they typically are. Drivers were becoming frustrated at how slowly traffic was moving. They were taking risks turning onto streets without looking carefully and pushing through yellow lights when they could stop. They were agitated.
This agitation stemmed from the number of cars on the road for the small compact peninsula of Halifax. In the mornings, around lunch time and then in the afternoon the roads are packed with cars and cyclists. I understand that there really isn’t room on many of the streets for bicycle lanes as well as car lanes. The city wasn’t built with cyclists in mind. The best solution is to reduce the number of cars in the city. Taking this idea to extremes it’s obvious that as the number of cars in the city approaches zero life for cyclists becomes very good.
I propose the city adopt London, England’s model and charge all cars that have only one person (not all cars and not taxis or buses) in them to enter the city. This solution encourages the use of public transportation and car-pooling while improving the air quality of the city. It will also increase the cities revenue (I realize they will also loose some from parking metres) which they could then put to good use purchasing bicycle racks and fixing pot holes in the roads.
To Dr Fever
Victoria is nearly identical in population to Halifax, and is our closest sized provincial capital city in Canada. The topography is also quite similar to ours as they are also a water-front city. Although Vancouver has a significantly larger population, the geography of the area is again quite similar to Halifax –large port city with population centres split by a body of water. The main difference between Halifax and Vic-Van is that they have adopted a grid-like city design, where we are a little bit more “snakes and ladders”. Even so, we should definitely compare ourselves to them, because at the end of the day, these cities are Canada’s cycling (and quality of life) Meccas. We’ve been trying to plan things on our own for quite some time now, and guess what: Our plans are out of step with the rest of Canada (if not North America) and we have little to no connectivity.
You are right though: We have to encourage our social environment to be more supportive of active transportation. The Halifax Cycling Coalition is doing just that through our “I Cycle Halifax” ads playing on Global TV and featured on Metro Transit busses and on pg 20 of the Coast this week. With that said, the biggest barrier we hear that discourages people from cycling is the lack of on-street and endpoint infrastructure (Physical environment). We can only do so much to encourage people to cycle. The city, as Chris Benjaman indicated, really has to change gears on this issue, be more proactive in establishing infrastructure, and stand by plans and targets passed by council.
Steve Bedard
Co-Chair, Halifax Cycling Coalition
Thank you for bringing that up Steve. Victoria, however, has nearly 4 times the urban population density of Halifax in most parts of HRM. Population isn’t always a good indicator of congestion. I would suggest that usage of bicycles is tied to density. I mean, nobody likes to be stuck in traffic, but for most people where bike travel can take upwards of an hour or more, it’s a troubling reality. We have a very small urban population in Halifax, and most suburban residential areas lie at least 10 to 20 KM from the downtown core, so most of the driving population is deterred thanks to distance, not just lack of access.
The only thing that access would deter are the younger people that typically travel to retail jobs. Access is indeed an issue there, as SteveDinn has already indicated.
http://www.cbc.ca/video/player.html?catego…
that is regular occurrence my daily commute.
check this site from England
http://www.fightbaddriving.co.uk/main/
The guy do the same with video camera
Taxpayer, you couldn’t be more correct. Please wake up Halifax (city council)!
How about the Shopping Meccas? Three times I have asked management at the Halifax Shopping Centre to move their bike rack off of the sewer grill. Evidently cyclists don’t buy big ticket items. So I bought my Mom’s 60th anniversary diamond necklace elsewhere.
Costco at the BLIP??? I’ve chained my bike to everything short of a moving car.
Note HRM’s recent purchase of the Chester Spur line to create a trail for non-motorized traffic; work is in progress, tracks are being torn up along Joe Howe now; latest news item I’ve seen about it:
http://www.burnsidenews.com/News/2010-05-1…
The Lord Nelson Hotel not only has no bike racks out front, the staff there repeatedly threaten to confiscate my bicycle if I park it on the city property (other side of the sidewalk) in front of the hotel.
You know where I won’t be holding the next conference I organize 🙂