The City of Vancouver hates Motorcycles

Or at least… the council does

For the last seven years, I have been commuting from the eastern suburbs of Vancouver into the downtown core, using my motorcycle as many days of the year as I can. We are blessed in Vancouver with temperate weather, weather that most people, Canadians and non-Canadians alike, are often surprised by. As I have mentioned before, it does rain a lot, but I have gear for that. I don’t ride in the torrential downpours, but I ride a lot, and year round.

HOV Lanes

One of the advantages here is that the Provincial Government recognizes motorcycles as high-occupancy vehicles. This is largely due to an advocacy effort That works in the HOV lanes on Highway 1, the Trans-Canada Highway. That works in the HOV lanes on Barnett Highway, and along Hastings Street through Burnaby. That works on the incredibly crowded Marine Drive in North Vancouver, allowing bikes to ride right up to the merge onto the Lion’s Gate Bridge. These are all eminently civilized.

That all comes to a grinding halt when you reach the borders of the City of Vancouver. The City of Vancouver is well known for their fondness for bicycles and public transit, and their hatred of internal combustion engines. (The BC Government is equally shortsighted in allowing electric vehicles in the HOV lanes, but that will have to be a whole other post). Once you arrive at the borders of the City of Vancouver, the gates of HOV Heaven are shut very tight. Former HOV lanes turn in to “Bus and Bicycle” lanes – because those two vehicles, of such disparate weight and speeds, make sense in the same lane (please ensure you have your sarcasm detectors on). These bus lanes currently use the same symbol on the pavement, but a different sign showing only busses and bicycles. And unfortunately, the City of Burnaby has elected to turn a 3KM stretch of Hastings street into a bus lane from 7AM to 7PM, 7 days a week, which makes very little sense – the HOV lanes worked just fine for busses, and for other commuters. They were far from packed with cars, even with the push to electric vehicles.

The Rise of the Electrics

The city will no doubt counter with the issue of electric bikes and scooters. This will likely be a whole other blog post at some point, with me being the old man shaking my fist at the clouds. That said, e-bikes, e-scooters, and other similar vehicles are improperly ridden by some, including riding them on sidewalks. They are vehicles capable of speeds far higher than ever contemplated previously, with the simple turn of the wrist, and they require no training whatsoever to achieve those speeds. There are no laws for safety (except the requirement for helmets), there is no enforcement of traffic laws for those that ride on sidewalks or run through stop signs, and even those who exceed the speed limits in school zones. I consider them to be both a blessing and a curse, but in the last 10 years they have grown in popularity such that motorcyclists get drowned out by vehicles that are electric motorcycles except in name only, that require no license to operate, no insurance, and the ability to ride 30 km/h or more at a stretch. These loosely regulated vehicles ultimately met the (being seen to be) green needs of the City Council, and their growth allows them to further discriminate against motorcycles.

Parking

I started taking transit when I got a new job downtown about 7 years ago. It lasted a month, precisely until I arrived at a change-over transit stop, and got to the new platform. This was the scene after THREE trains had gone by already. Needless to say that I was late for work that day, and I was kind of wondering where the ushers were, like in Tokyo, wearing white gloves and pushing the sardines into the can. So, I had enough, and as it was March and the weather was getting nicer, I started to commute by motorcycle. It turns out it was much faster to commute by motorcycle than it was to take transit – go figure.

I had even found a nice little motorcycle parking space right by my office that could fit four bikes, and was free. There were a few motorcycle specific parking spots nearby, and those little green-topped meters allowed you to stay for as long as you want, as long as you pay for it – they were free of the two or three hour restrictions of a regular parking spot, and are (according to the City of Vancouver) at a rate 50% less than a standard parking spot. Someone should point out to the city that these spots are still overpriced, fairly rare, and often beside free locations. We will come back to the free locations shortly.

The City of Toronto permits free motorcycle parking, but doesn’t have dedicated spots that I can tell, so you are stuck only able to park for 2 or 3 hours at a time. Still, it’s free! That has apparently been floated to the City of Vancouver council before – nearly 13 years ago, apparently. In April, 2012, a local man looking to increase motorbike parking in Vancouver, and the city engineering services GM agreed at the time. Just a month later, that initiative was “nixed” according to Business in Vancouver. That magazine reports, on May 28, 2012:

“The point was to discount [the meters] so people would start using them more, and we’d earn more revenue, we’d encourage more people to use different modes of transportation.”

Affleck said the Vision Vancouver-dominated council rejected the price reduction because of a “very green agenda.”

“[The Vision perspective was] if it wasn’t an electric bike, it didn’t really count as something that’s worthy for discounting at any time,” he said.

~Business in Vancouver, May 28, 2012

This for simply easier access to parking in the City, and primarily downtown where parking is at a premium during the workweek. The matter has never come up again, apparently. This has been a bother for me for some time. However, I’ve always had my free parking spot, so I haven’t been all that active about it – just bothered. That all changed recently.

Changes coming …

Below is the photo of where I often park my bike. You can see, there is room for four motorcycles. The sign post on the left notes that there is no stopping beyond that point (to the left), and the hard rubber bollard on the right shows the end of the car parking area.

And below, a different view, showing the no stopping sign on the post:

Now you can see that things have changed:

You can see the workers painted where the sign should go, and they have now relocated the no stopping sign right to the rubber bollard. There will now be no motorcycle parking allowed there – unless the city chooses to make that a designated motorcycle parking spot, with a meter. Because rather than making it easier to park a motorcycle, the city want to make it harder. Riding a motorcycle is already difficult, but it’s more environmentally friendly than my car. However, the City doesn’t want to look at it that way, it seems. Post COVID, I have little desire to commute over an hour and a half in a series of tin cans, each way. Nor will I cycle for six hours a day. The city is truly squeezing out a really viable, clean choice. Where there is free motorcycle parking (indicated by a sign) which is quite rare, it’s normally terrible spots, and these are disappearing in favour of pay spots.

As it happens, I was walking right in this area earlier this week, and a lovely silver V-Strom was parking in the new no-stopping area. Also stopping there was a parking warden, so I asked him point blank about this change. He said yes, it’s a new change, and it’s discretionary in his opinion. He was well aware that the bikes had parked there for some time – always obeying the old sign, of course, because the city loves to ticket motorcycles. The thing is that it’s discretionary in his opinion, and all about whether vehicles can make the right hand turn at the intersection. But that’s only his opinion – one out of dozens of traffic wardens that patrol this area. The odds that we always have his discretion available are slim, and I’ve no doubt that tickets will be issued starting right away.

Resources

It would appear that there are several efforts surrounding motorcycle parking, but all seem to have fizzled, quite frankly. And the City of Vancouver Transportation site shows absolutely nothing about motorcycles and scooters in their future transportation plans. In fact, they are touting that getting around by bicycle is “the Vancouver way”, meaning the only thing they care about seems to be bicycles and electric mobility. Frustrated by searching there, I have found the following alternatives.

• MCParking.ca was trying to have some voice for motorcyclists, primarily about Lower Mainland motorcycle parking, lane splitting, and lane filtering. Their banner says that the city should have “motorcycle / scooter parking… LOTS of it.” I agree with the sentiment, if not the grammar. This appears to be the same group that was pushing this to City Council in 2012, without success. Now, both the website and the Facebook page haven’t been updated in forever. I’d check their Google+, but that was shut down in 2019.
• The Greater Vancouver Motorcycle Club is a social club, and not a lobbying organization. Their website is a fun read for a club that has over 100 years of history.
• The BC Coalition of Motorcyclists, the fine group that got us HOV status and pre-boarding on BC Ferries. They have done great work, but it appears the website is near broken, and their Instagram is not often updated.
• MotoCanada, which represents motorcycle manufacturers and their interest. So, not so much help there. Except there is, and they have some great statistics about motorcycle sales, the benefits that motorcycles bring, and interestingly, the total economic impact that motorcycles have on the economy in Canada and broken down by province (National and BC are linked below). The economic impact on British Columbia alone is pretty interesting, with over 12,000 jobs and $2.5 billion in economic revenue.

Finally, I thought I would check with the BC Provincial government. Here, you can find a link to the Province’s Clean Transportation Action Plan (CTAP), which unsurprisingly is connected with the near-universal 2030 electric vehicle push. The Action Plan is, as expected, “coming soon”. Further digging has found that input is theoretically closed as of April of 2023.

Take Action!

We need to stand up and take action! I think the only thing we can do is start to correspond with the City of Vancouver, and start to force the issue. Write to the Vancouver Mayor and Council via their feedback form, and be sure to upload the Moto Canada documents. There doesn’t seem to be a direct way to contact City of Vancouver Engineering, cited in some of the articles above, aside from by telephone – however, that might be a route to pursue. Despite the timeline being closed, write to the CTAP, and push for them to provide more room for motorcycles in the future plans. Write to your local city council and your councilor, and your MLA, and start requesting that this matter be debated.

In order to focus the conversation on the green alternative that motorcycles are, and the idea that there should be more space at lower rates for motorcycles, it would be beneficial to make the green arguments and the infrastructure arguments. Some suggestions:

• Given their relative size to a car (and now primarily to SUVs), motorcycles and scooters are more fuel efficient than other motorized vehicles, and have far lower emissions, especially with motorcycles now meeting the new Euro 5 and Euro 5+ standards.
• In our current era of inflation and much higher prices, with volatility on the rise with a new administration in the US, transportation costs are a considerable factor for many. The BC Lower Mainland’s transit infrastructure is imperfect, and people still want to have choice in how they get around. Our climate is unique in Canada to allowing the use of motorcycles year-round, and they should be part of any comprehensive transportation plan going forward, allowing more choice, mobility, and freedom for residents.
• Motorcycles and scooters require much less space overall, occupy less space in traffic, and take up smaller spaces when parking.
• Motorcycles and scooters, by being smaller and more nimble vehicles, contribute to less gridlock and ease the flow of traffic – especially if lane filtering were to be considered.
• There is less wear and tear, and less pressure, on the transportation infrastructure due to their lower space requirements, lower weight, and ease of movement in case of a breakdown.
• 85% of commuter vehicles carry only one person, and motorcycles are instantly high-occupancy vehicles.
• The costs and environmental impacts to build a motorcycle are dramatically lower, with estimates that it takes about 1/8^th of the resources to build a motorcycle over a car. This lower monetary and environmental cost has knock-on effects for not only the consumer, but also for other road users, municipalities, and provincial and federal governments.

In the Meantime…

Once a week, I commute against traffic, but still with the benefit of an HOV lane when I’m on the bike. I head out to the suburbs, where my company has a smaller regional office to both service a clientele cohort that is primarily based east of the city, and to also allow some of our employees an office to work from that saves them a lot of travel into the city. When I first started to attend there, I was shocked at what seemed to be, truly, manna from heaven: dedicated, identified, free motorcycle parking.

It is a simple act to give some kindness to motorcycle riders, and to acknowledge that they might be doing it for fun, but just might be doing it to reduce their own fuel consumption and their own transportation footprint. This should be celebrated, and not pushed out.