ADA Access limited by Bike Lane - secondary unintended consequences
The ADA improvements along Columbia are welcome. Less welcome is the parking removal to define a bike lane. The result of this is residents have no choice but to park in their driveways (or around the block from their own house). The secondary unintended consequence of this is that people are now frequently partially or completely blocking the sidewalk parking in their driveways. People in wheelchairs now have to dip into the street to go around these poorly parked cars, crossing into and back out of the new bike lane. Vancouver really needs to better consider when designing a bike lane the secondary effects of things like removing residential parking and where all those cars have to go that previously parked on the street. Visitors to their residences can no longer park in front, etc. Disenfranchising two groups, one somewhat intentionally (homeowners) and one unintentionally (people with mobility challenges) is not a good tradeoff for improved bike access. Homeowner rights were trampled in this process; that is also a poor precedent. I hope their will be follow-up studies on the use of this new bike lane to quantify how many people are actually served by it.
Consultation has concluded