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The days of the Fourth Avenue bike lanes are numbered, after Saskatoon city council voted to nix what will end up having been a 30-month long pilot project by the time they are removed.
But the idea of a downtown bike lane network has survived.
City councillors voted overwhelmingly in favour of removing the widely disliked Fourth Ave. lanes on Monday in a 9-2 decision, citing negative public reaction to the infrastructure pilot project.
The lanes are due to be removed by June 30.
“It wasn’t a good pilot project, and I think us leaving it there for as long as we did tainted and soured the community (to bike lanes),” Ward 1 Coun. Darren Hill said.
The lanes were initially installed in 2016 as a pilot project demonstration on a minimal budget, to gauge how protected lanes would affect how many people cycled through the downtown core.
Drivers have criticized the lanes for making intersections more dangerous due to blind spots involving cyclists, while others have complained that the paths are seldom used and the lanes were often cleared of snow before roads in the winter.
Cycling groups have argued the Fourth Ave. lanes didn’t connect properly in a network, which limited the potential for use.
In recent weeks, Transportation Director Jay Magus has conceded the Fourth Ave. pilot had disappointed city staff as well — noting they were “not overly happy” with the result.
While the Fourth Ave. bike lanes met their demise during Monday’s council meeting, the other set of temporary lanes on 23rd Street survived a bid for removal in a 6-5 vote.
Mayor Charlie Clark and councillors Sarina Gersher, Hilary Gough, Cynthia Block, Mairin Loewen and Zach Jeffries voted against removing the 23rd St. route, maintaining the single cycling path through the downtown for now.
Plans for future downtown bike lanes continue
The same set of councillors also approved a motion establishing 23rd St., 19th St. and Third Ave. as the future routes for a permanent downtown bike lane network — though they’re squeezing the brakes on how to go about building them.
Coun. Mairin Loewen successfully proposed for city staff to engage in community consultations on how the permanent bike lanes would be designed. She emphasized the importance of gaining input from drivers, business owners, cyclists and pedestrians in order to come up with a design that “works for everybody.”
The motion came forward after Magus told council city staff have had trouble gaining input on bike lane design, because often the public response has simply been “I don’t want bike lanes at all.”
“It’s very difficult to make any progress without that identification (about routes),” Loewen said.
“We’ve also heard from members of the community and from downtown Saskatoon that there are a number of questions about design and about functionality, and I think it’s really important that we devote attention to those.”
Loewen’s motion also included an amendment from Coun. Jeffries, specifying that no money would be spent on construction or detailed design of the bike lanes until community consultations were completed.
The consultations are set to be completed by 2021, after the next civic election.
A separate bid by Coun. Bev Dubois to halt all work on the downtown bike lane network failed in a 6-5 vote, with the same councillors voting on both sides.