Mayor encouraged Alberta government wants to be ‘proactive’ in bike-lane debate

Legislation is coming this fall to give the province more power over bike lanes in Alberta municipalities. CTV News Edmonton's Jeremy Thompson has the story.

The Alberta government is planning to bring in legislation this coming fall to give direction to cities about where to construct bicycle lanes.

That the province is looking at such a measure doesn’t come as a surprise, given that a year ago in April, Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen waded into a debate over the installation of bike-lane infrastructure along a stretch of 132 Avenue on Edmonton’s north side.

There, seven blocks of the east-west corridor had been converted from a four-lane roadway to one that provides two lanes for vehicle traffic and two for bicycle traffic. And it’s not the end of the project: the City of Edmonton’s plans for 132 Avenue will install bike lanes over seven kilometres of it, from Fort Road west to 127 Street.

A year ago, a group of residents registered their frustrations over the installation of bike infrastructure in another north side neighbourhood, Delton, saying the changes would hamper emergency services, remove street parking and make it more difficult for residents with disabilities to navigate. Last week, residents in Grovenor voiced displeasure over impending changes to their west-central neighbourhood to add space for bike traffic at the expense of parking and two-way streets.

Dreeshen, speaking to the media Monday at an announcement about the expansion of Whitemud Drive in the city’s west end, essentially repeated what he said last year regarding the various Edmonton bike-traffic projects: that the province supports bicycle infrastructure but not at the expense of road capacity.

“Whether that’s making traffic worse, whether it’s taking away parking, whether it’s more difficult for senior citizens to get around, whether it’s for safety vehicles or emergency vehicles to be able to move, plowing those roads in the winter, there’s cascading of negative effects when you actually take away and limit a driving lane,” Dreeshen told reporters.

And while he also said, like he did last fall, “everything’s on the table” when it comes to future decisions on bike lanes, including the possibility of removing some, he added that the government is “proactively” looking at the best ways to do that, if needed, in the legislation that’s expected to be introduced in late October during the fall sitting, “so you’re not having to undo (work).”

“We’re looking at proactively trying to stop bike lanes that don’t make sense, but retroactively, going through where bike lanes have been put in place, but understanding that they have been built,” Dreeshen said.

“Not all bike lanes are treated equal. Some have painted lines, others have concrete barriers, so it does depend on the type of bike lanes and the cost to remove them, but we would do it to make life better and traffic better for people, so that is something that the legislation will consider.”

Edmonton Mayor Andrew Knack, in attendance at the same Monday media conference, said he was encouraged to hear Dreeshen not only sought to be proactive when it comes to the province inserting itself into municipal bicycle lane decisions, given the costs that would be involved in removing some styles of bike infrastructure, but also to commit to making “data-informed decisions.”

“While I would prefer to not have any legislation, because I think we’ve been very thorough in how we’ve developed it, at the end of the day, if they are looking to develop legislation, our goal now is to work in collaboration to make sure that legislation is as successful as it can be,” Knack said.

“We’re really trying to focus on forward-looking infrastructure, because I do worry about the conversation around retroactive changes, because there’s a significant cost that could be associated to that, especially at a time where we have to be investing in roadway projects like (the Whitemud expansion). We have to be investing in the entire transportation network.”

Edmonton’s city council in 2022 committed $100 million over a four-year cycle, from 2022-26, to the active transportation network, with $65 million of it committed to projects so far.

Currently, Edmonton has 44 kilometres of protected bike lanes and 36 kilometres of painted bike lanes. Its total active transportation network, of which 80 per cent is made up of shared pathways, has more than 1,700 kilometres of routes for walking and cycling, among other means of transport.

The city told CTV News Edmonton on Monday that 15 per cent of Edmonton’s bike network is shared roadways, on which bikes share the road with vehicles, while three per cent of the active transportation network is made of protected bike lanes and two per cent is painted bike lanes where paint lines delineate space for bikes on streets.

In terms of bicycle and “wheeled mobility” usage of the active transportation network, the city said that it increased by seven per cent overall from 2022 to 2024, highlighting that ridership rose 43 per cent from October to March, “the colder months,” those years. It said annual downtown bicycle counts increased 15 per cent from 2022 to 2024.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Jeremy Thompson