A new bike is as good an excuse as any to explore. It was a solo ride, so apologies in advance for all the bike pics… This ride is inspired by our recent BC Bike Infrastructure index and the mapping for it, as I realized there were a few local trails I hadn’t ridden before. I’ve also been thinking about how gravel trails fit into our active transportation network as we shift from a focus on all ages and abilities to levels of comfort in BC…

In Calgary for our (ISL) staff conference on what I think was one of the first hot days of the year, many people were out enjoying the weather on two wheels. Like any time I ride around a city, there’s always some interesting new things to see, and on this occasion, that included interesting lane width observations, intersection treatments, traffic calming, and tactile surfaces amongst other things…

Whenever over in Victoria, I usually try and take a few photos of some of the bike projects I’ve had a chance to work on with the City. This time, I experimented with some film clips to try and capture the experience a little better. If you’ve never biked from the ferry down to Victoria, or around Victoria itself, below are some photos as I’d normally take and a couple of short films…

Just as we thought the winter was over, a final blast of snow snuck in… We all know that the “nobody bikes in the rain or snow” argument is a myth, but it never hurts to show that once in a while… So with snow in the forecast and a need to be downtown, I took the camera out hoping for some epic people riding bikes in the snow shots…

The City of Victoria on Vancouver Island has done so much in the last decade to enable people of all ages and abilities get around the city by various types of micro mobility that today, it feels close to having Dutch levels of connectivity… And they’re not done yet… I was excited to see Nic’s take on it…

My Fujifilm X100VI is a great small fixed-lens camera, it’s the only camera I've taken on the last few trips to Europe when traveling light, I love the Fuji colours that come out of it, and I never thought I needed anything else, or anything smaller... Then Fujifilm announced the X half and I grew curious about an even smaller camera with those same Fuji colours, and the potential to travel even lighter…

Most people might associate Canmore with access to the Rockies… The hiking, the biking, and the climbing… But I love it for what they’re doing from an urban transportation perspective… The bike paths, the continuous sidewalks, and the much safer intersection designs… The choices this mountain town is making to build a more sustainable future provide lessons for others…

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…

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…

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…