The Real Cost of Vancouver Bike Lanes

Vancouver bike lanes | BCBusiness
According to two studies commissioned by the City of Vancouver, bike lanes are hurting business.

Vancouver’s bike lanes and the politics of building civic infrastructure.

The results are in: according to the two studies commissioned by the City of Vancouver to evaluate the impacts of the new separated bike lanes on Hornby and Dunsmuir streets, some businesses were harmed by installation of the bike lanes.


That’s hardly a surprise, though; almost all infrastructure projects involve costs borne disproportionately by the local businesses whose daily operations are disrupted. In this case, according to one of the recently released studies, businesses on Hornby reported suffering a 10-per-cent decline in sales, while those on Dunsmuir took a four-per-cent hit. Though certainly not trivial, these outcomes represent a predictable private cost swallowed unhappily by a few for the sake of the public good. 


Questioning the merit of bike lanes

Of course, not everyone agrees that bike lanes are a public good. But with this fall’s municipal election looming, the question of their merit has been obscured by a conflagration of political rhetoric, with eco-futurists squaring off against car-bound populists. Every argument that the segregated lanes protect cyclists is met with an anecdote about emergency services stymied by concrete flower beds. The issue has left the realm of policy debate and entered the field of op-ed sound bites and political mudslinging. 


The impact studies do, however, reveal that there is a dimension to the Great Bike Lane Brawl of 2011 that has yet to be adequately analyzed: What’s the best way for governments to go about building public goods that have significant private costs?


Building the Canada Line

The Canada Line offers a precedent – one that’s backed by the wisdom of our courts. The cut-and-cover process that was adopted for building the underground light rail line disrupted traffic north of King Edward Avenue from mid-2005 through December 2008. It was a costly project for all taxpayers, but the price was much higher for Cambie Street merchants. 


For the three years during which the intersection of 16th Avenue and Cambie Street was a noisy eyesore accommodating only a trickle of traffic due to Canada Line construction, Susan Heyes saw profit from her Hazel & Co. clothing boutique cut in half. She had been near the intersection for 10 years, averaging $329,424 in annual profit between 2000 and 2004. In her lawsuit seeking damages from TransLink, she claimed she averaged only $171,258 annually in the following four years. In May 2009, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ian Pitfield sided with her, awarding Heyes $600,000 as compensation.


In his decision, Justice Pitfield emphasized the lack of transparency and public consultation in choosing the cut-and-cover method. Describing the 10 options outlined in the plan debated and passed by council in 2003, he notes that “each contemplated a bored tunnel under Cambie Street between 6th Avenue and King Edward.” The cut-and-cover plan was later adopted because it saved more than $400 million. Pitfield found that “the reduction in cost was achieved by imposing an unacceptable burden on Hazel & Co.”


A similar complaint has arisen in the case of the bike lanes. Real estate developer Rob Macdonald (whose portfolio includes the St. Regis Hotel at Dunsmuir and Seymour streets) complained last February that “what little information that was provided to the public was misleading and the public was intentionally given no voice on the matter.” In both cases it is a complaint about poor communication that has resonated. No one is claiming that government should not build infrastructure.


So is communication government’s only obligation? Gordon Price, director of SFU’s City Program and a vocal bike lane supporter, thinks it depends on what’s being communicated. Since some public goods inevitably come with private costs, government’s responsibility is to ask the right questions about those costs, Price says: “What are they? Is there a way I can mitigate them? Or is it something that has to be accepted because the public good overrides the individual negative?” As Heyes demonstrated, the courts provide a recourse for business owners who don’t think the right questions were asked – or answered. 


Business damages resulting from the bike lanes may or may not eventually be decided by the courts, but in the meantime, there’s that other avenue of recourse available to businesses: the court of public opinion.


Roads are one piece of public infrastructure many of us are forced to share every day, negotiating for space as we navigate the city. “In the end, if you are actually going to make a move to reallocate road space, don’t think for a moment that it’s not going to get emotional,” Price warns. And emotional issues are the stuff of campaigns, not consultations. Indeed, this election season promises to be an emotional one.