Gregor Robertson’s Vancouver just got even more bike-friendly.

On May 6, Vancouver’s city council voted to dedicate $25 million to its cycling program over the next two years. The investment will pay for a host of improvements to the city’s cycling network, and also fund a new ten-year plan for the city’s cycling program. Among other things, that plan will address strategies for getting commuters out of their cars and onto their bicycles. The mayor hopes that, come 2020, bicycles will account for 10% of all trips to work in Vancouver, three times what they accounted for in the 2006 census. It’s all part of the City’s strategy to become the “greenest city in the world.”

Some might say it’s an ambitious goal. But the Province, in an editorial penned the same day, called it hubristic. The writer dismissed the investment as a waste, sneering that council “[holds] to the adage in W. P. Kinsella’s Field of Dreams, ‘if you build it, they will come.’ While that may be true with fictitious ball players, the evidence is that it’s not working with commuters. Those interested in cycling to work already do.”

Do they? And is it a waste? While it’s easy to dismiss the Province’s grumbling as just another example of a Canwest paper hating on bicycles, the Field of Dreams reference is one of those annoying common-sense arguments that can be difficult to answer coherently. What if Vancouver really was throwing money at a nonexistent need? What if Vancouver commuters never completed more than 3.7% of their trips by bicycle?

Curious to know whether the City was riding down the right path, I made some phone calls in the hopes that someone could tell me what’s keeping Vancouverites off their bicycles now.

According to Dr. Kay Teschke, principal investigator of the University of British Columbia’s Cycling in Cities project, the two major factors keeping people away from bicycle commuting in Vancouver are lack of safety and inclement weather. “And safety trumps weather,” she says. Research conducted by Teschke and her colleagues shows that Metro Vancouver cyclists – from daily riders to those who hold their handlebars less than once a year – prefer riding in places where they don’t feel threatened by traffic. In descending order, these are off-street bike paths; on-street bike lanes separated by a barrier; and residential, traffic-calmed bikeways. However, of these options, only the residential bikeways feature prominently in the city’s bicycle route network, and Teschke speculates that the traffic calming on these routes often falls below cyclists’ standards. In other words, though Vancouver’s bike route network has grown to an impressive 415 lane-kilometres in recent years, it may not provide potential cyclists enough of a feeling of safety to entice them into riding.

The Burrard Bridge, however, may be the start of something quite new. Since last July, cyclists have had their own, fully separated lanes over the bridge. A few months after the changes, city staff reported that cycling trips across the bridge had increased by 26% over what would otherwise be expected. Female riders accounted for significantly more of the new trips than did male riders, something that Teschke says is consistent with expectations: “in the places where there are those kinds of facilities, we see a different demographic riding than in most of North America.” For instance, in Denmark and Holland, where separated bike facilities have been developed extensively, Teschke says “there’s virtually no difference between age groups and between sexes in the proportions riding.”

Scott Edwards, the City of Vancouver’s Greenways and Neighbourhood Transportation Engineer, sees the increased cycle volume on the Burrard Bridge as a sign that separated lanes do encourage more people to ride. Which is convenient, because the city is building more of them. He explains that city council is currently working on building connections between cycle-only lanes such as the Burrard Bridge, the Dunsmuir Viaduct, and the Seawall, and downtown. Construction has already begun on a fully separated, two-way bike track on Dunsmuir between the Viaduct and Burrard. This will later be followed by a north-south separated lane connecting the Dunsmuir route to the Burrard bridge. “We hope to see similar increases in…the numbers,” says Edwards. “Dunsmuir provides a great connection from the Adanac bikeway through to the downtown core.” In other words, cycling downtown, now only done by the brave and hardy, will soon be within reach of a broad range of riders.

Lack of safety may be the major factor keeping potential cyclists off the road, but weather plays a role too. And the difficult thing about bad weather is that, unlike safety conditions on the roads, you can’t do much to improve it. Research conducted through Cycling in Cities compared rates of participation in utilitarian cycling – that’s cycling for function, not for fun – in cities across Canada. Sure enough, the more it rained, the less people cycled. Nevertheless, Teschke dismisses the suggestion that a rainy climate makes Vancouver inhospitable for cyclists – “our weather,” she says, “and the weather in Copenhagen and Amsterdam are very similar.” People seem to do fine there. And besides, she adds, rain isn’t nearly as much of a deterrent as are snow and ice, and Vancouver is mostly free of these.

So can Vancouver develop a culture of cycling worthy of the greenest city in the world? Arno Schortinghuis, president of the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition, thinks so. He notes that Europe, now famously bicycle-friendly, became increasingly auto-dependent through the mid-20^th century. But being resource-poor has its advantages: “there was the oil shock in the 1970s, and [Europeans] realized, hey, we don’t have any oil – we’d better wake up here and do something. And that’s when they started switching to cycling.” Vancouver, he says, is where Copenhagen was forty years ago. “Now almost 40% of trips are made by bicycle, and [Copenhagen is] going gangbusters trying to make it 50.”

Teschke agrees that Vancouver has a fighting chance of getting more bikes on the road, but she measures her words. “We’ve got a long way to go,” she says. But even, she says, if Vancouver only got to its 10% target, the result would be worthwhile. The issue is one of choice, she says. In cities like Copenhagen, there are four main choices for a commuter – one can go by car, transit, on a bike, or on foot. But in Vancouver, the biking option is limited at best. And, “when you do make that available,” she says, “it really takes some of the pressure off the car option, because bikes take up far less room than cars. If you have one car on the road, that same space could be taken by three or even four bikes.”

And as for that 10%: “It’s a very realistic target.”