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Dover Road bike lane goes nowhere

A real bike lane connects suburbs with significant destinations over a significant distance.

To the Editor,

Re: Nanaimo fosters use of alternative transportation with bike lanes, Aug. 27.

As an avid recreational cyclist and sometime cycle commuter myself, I went to take a look at the work the city had carried out.

To my deep disappointment, I found that the highly touted bike lanes the city has created consist of a single line painted on the north side of Dover Road from Uplands Road to Applecross Road – a stretch of approximately 200 metres – plus a couple of cyclist symbols painted on the road. There’s nothing before it; there’s nothing after it. That 200m stretch is all there is.

For a bike lane, this location is useless. Hammond Bay Road, a few blocks to the south, is the real transportation corridor in the area for both cyclists and motorists. Dover Road is a side street (arbitrary bike-route designation notwithstanding) which doesn’t really go anywhere; it changes into Lantzville Road somewhere around Pioneer Park and wanders vaguely out of town.

A real bike lane connects suburbs with significant destinations (downtown, a bike path, a transportation hub, etc.) over a significant distance. How does this 200m bike lane promote or foster anything?

What this is, in fact, is an exercise in window-dressing and chest-thumping without anything substantive actually having been done.

R.K. Stockervia e-mail