With senior ISL staff in Vancouver for the management retreat, it was an opportunity to take some time out and show Dan Zeggelaar, our Sustainable Transportation Lead in Edmonton, around some pedestrian and bike-related things old and new in Downtown Vancouver. We ticked off a number of protected bike lanes and intersections of course, the Granville Bridge bike lane (and benches), and some local street bikeways and the plazas along them…

To make riding a bicycle safer and more comfortable for more people, there are many things we can do beyond just protected bike lanes, and each little thing combines to create a bigger picture that starts to look a bit more like the Netherlands. I’m pleased to say that in the last few days, the City of Burnaby took a step beyond most other cities in North America, and rebranded one of their local street bikeways a bicycle street complete with fietsstraat inspired pavement markings!

Metral Drive, and the engineering standards behind it, remains a highlight project for me and for ISL and the others that worked on it. It’s been a few years now, but it’s still one of the best examples of continuous sidewalks and bike paths in North America. Chatting with Nic in Eindhoven during our Lessons from the Dutch video, I was keen for him to experience Metral Drive for himself…

The thought was just to enjoy the city for a few days at the end of the trip, but it’s hard to leave the camera in the bag when you’re watching the busy scenes unfold on Vredenburg… This is what can happens when you build a city for bicycles (and walking and transit)…

The two things I remember most from Gdańsk are the pain of trying to navigate the cobbled streets on a Brompton and then the incredible feeling of having a multi-lane arterial to ourselves as the bike parade toured around the city. With no research other than booking a trip to Velo-City, Gdańsk was a complete unknown to me…

Just a quick one to share some fun scenes from car free day on St Johns Street in Port Moody… It was quite the difference from two days prior as we waited to pick up pizza from the takeout window at Spacca Napoli. Today, there were no screeching tires or blasting horns… Just music and laughter…

I’ve never seen Water Street in Gastown so lively… That, and a bunch of other good bike and urban realm based things that I’ve captured in photos recently, some new, some less common than they should be, as well as some new project photos…

For a few years now I’ve been visiting the Netherlands and have been sharing the design elements and techniques they use to make getting around by bicycle the natural choice. I had the opportunity to share those lessons with Nic Laporte as we crossed paths in Eindhoven and played a game of Lesson from the Dutch (LFTD) Bingo…

They reallocated space between curbs for people riding bicycles, they reallocated lanes for buses, they closed streets in the centre and reallocated them for people instead of cars, and that’s all great… But I wasn’t aware that there is another amazing reallocation of space cutting through the city from one end to the other…

In Part 2 we ride through some of the worst weather we’ve encountered in the Netherlands, take some new shots of familiar locations, visit bike tunnels we missed last time, finally take some shots of turbo roundabouts, do some filming, and enjoy a little beach time as the weather finally warms up…

In past years on our Dutch trips, we’ve set out on a bit of a mission to see how far the bike network extends… And turns out it extended everywhere we went… This year would be a bit slower paced, enjoying a few cities and their surroundings within South Holland… There was no focus other than to once again enjoy the Netherlands, but there’s always things to see along the way that are worth sharing…

Three names that don’t always go together, but I had a quick trip to Calgary to present Lessons from the Dutch at the Southern Alberta ITE Luncheon, and as always, I took the opportunity to learn a little by checking out the infrastructure while there. I make a quick stop to see what’s new in Canmore, take in a few routes around Calgary, and a quick check-in on our Guildford Way project in Coquitlam…

A spin around Downtown Vancouver to check out a couple of things… including the cherry blossoms, some seawall and Stanley Park shots, a reasonably new protected bike lane and a neat innovation that helps reduce the risk of right hooks…

We had a few warm days last week, but things got in the way of riding my bike. So with temperatures of 18 degree in the forecast, the shorts were on for a ride through north Burnaby, North Vancouver and back via Vancouver, taking in some old projects and relevant bits of infrastructure along the way… It never got close to 18 degrees…

With a bit of spare time to kill in and around Victoria, I spent some time in the City, along the regional trails, and checking in on early construction work for our ISL project at Uptown in Saanich that will support RapidBus and active transportation…