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Today, Halifax Regional Council unanimously approved installing a protected two-way bike lane on Rainnie Drive in the city’s north end.
The 300-metre bikeway is a pilot project to assess the functionality and maintenance of protected lanes as HRM tries to boost its cyclist infrastructure.
The structural opportunity comes about due to recent street changes from installing the North Park roundabout. The new intersection at North Park, Cogswell, Trollope and Ahern no longer includes a connection to Rainnie, and staff have determined the road is now surplus to any traffic needs.
With 12 metres of road available over one travel and two parking lanes, Rainnie is nearly four metres wider than other nearby one-way streets with parking. That will make it easier to install the protected bike lane—the first of its kind in HRM. Once completed, a three-metre wide, two-way bike lane will run between the curb and an 80-centimetre “buffer zone” containing a row of protective posts.
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Currently, the municipality’s bike lanes are at the mercy of drivers choosing to respect painted-on lines. That’s not only less safe, but also leads to parking confusion like what’s been happening on Hollis Street. The municipality’s only other proposed, protected bike lane project—along University Avenue—is on hold while HRM and Dalhousie deal with legal action from a hot dog vendor.
Whether the Rainnie Street project prompts further protected bike lanes construction will depend on an assessment of its use, says the staff report by active transportation coordinator Hanita Koblents. Consultants are currently studying the feasibility of connecting the new bikeway the final 200 metres down to Brunswick Street. Once that’s complete, staff notes the Rainnie Drive lane will “nearly close the gap” between Greenway trails on the Common and the bike lanes already on Brunswick.
The costs of the paint, posts and sign bases required for the new bikeway is $8,550. That amount is included in the $103,086 tender recently awarded to Dexter Construction for planned curb and sidewalk work already being completed along Rainnie.
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Looking down the road at the Hollis Street bike lane’s future
The long, winding road to getting a bike lane built in Halifax
New bike lanes coming to Hollis Street
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2015.
Finally! Really hope this gets the ball rolling. I would love for my son (now 4) to one day be able to cycle from his north end home to Citadel high exclusively on protected (i.e. safe) bike lanes. Is it too much to ask that our children be able to get to school safely?
epiong – He could walk, more healthy.
We’ve had “protected “bike lanes for a century now. We call them “sidewalks”
These kinds of bike lanes are the only ones I approve of, the ones that don’t block REAL traffic. Problem is most of our roads are too narrow for them so all of us sane people will have to suffer listening to the cyclist intelligencia screeching at the top of their lungs about bike lanes for the rest of our time here.
Of course as my esteemed colleague Joseph said earlier we could save a shitload of money and make bikes go on the sidewalk where they belong. I totally get that is not a valid solution for streets like Skin Garden, but REAL traffic moves so slowly there bikes wouldn’t slow it down anyway. Everywhere I go in town outside a few busy pedestrian streets I see kilometers of empty sidewalks, but nah cyclists don’t want those because that wouldn’t make the drivers of REAL traffic angry when they get stuck behind one of them.
Damn, why is it so hard to just share the road? If you’re behind a cyclist how long do they really set you back, less then a minute on your commute?
But nice to see this plan come to fruition. I look forward to biking it while visiting next summer.