As of Monday, July 20th, Broadway is closed between Cambie St and Alberta St for 6 months to facilitate station construction of the new Broadway subway, with a detour to 8th Ave. in place for vehicles and buses. We’ve had several reasons to be concerned about this detour. First, two of the closest parallel roads (10th and 7th) are dedicated bike routes. Second, the area also has very high pedestrian volumes. Whenever we see high volumes of vehicles mixing with more vulnerable road users, good planning is needed to ensure safety for all. Finally, the previous road closure at Broadway and Main went poorly, resulting in several cyclists being hit on 10th.
Just over a week into this new road closure, it seems to be going better than the closure at Broadway and Main. We credit that first and foremost to the existing infrastructure in the area of Broadway and Cambie. In the Main St area, 10th Ave has no diverters or modal filters at all between Main and Alberta, save for an (easily-bypassed) one-way eastbound at Quebec. Meanwhile, east of Cambie there are opposite direction one-way diverters at Yukon and Cambie, and then the route is fully separated from vehicle traffic between Ash to Oak, while the 7th Ave bikeway has modal filters at Heather and at Oak.
In addition to the stronger existing infrastructure compared with the Broadway and Main area, we also give credit to city staff for making a greater effort to consult with stakeholder groups such as ours and address concerns together ahead of time. We are pleased with the temporary diverter installed on Alberta for this detour, and believe something similar could have made a big impact in the Main & Broadway closure as well.
Even with the better infrastructure landscape, there are still some pain points we’re keeping an eye on. We were particularly concerned about the 7th Ave bike route here as conditions are already challenging at the best of times. We requested temporary delineators for the closure and were told by city staff that the existing painted lanes here are so narrow they cannot safely accommodate delineators.
Anticipating a flood of traffic during the detour, we started conducting traffic counts in the area pre-closure to have a baseline to compare to.
From our counts we can see that across the 3 blocks of 7th between Yukon and Heather, there’s been an average 60% increase in vehicle traffic since the detour started. The worst of this impact is felt on the west side of Cambie where baseline volumes were lower: 7th Ave between Ash and Heather saw a 120% increase in morning traffic volumes compared to before the closure. Seeing such a dramatic spike in traffic on a bike route, our concern is that we will see a corresponding spike in crashes. We haven’t heard of one yet, which is excellent, but we’d like the city to take some more steps in this area to help ensure it doesn’t happen.
We’re also watching pedestrian conditions throughout the area, particularly along Cambie at Broadway, 8th, and 7th which all have busy and challenging crossings. The closure of the east pedestrian crossing of Broadway at Cambie poses a significant risk as this is a high volume crossing to the station entrance, and the detour presented takes significantly longer. We have already witnessed dozens of pedestrians crossing illegally here and hope this crossing will be prioritized to be restored as soon as possible. We’re also seeing lots of pedestrian-vehicle conflict at the 7th and Cambie crossing and hope that signal adjustments (such as advance crossing time for pedestrians and a northbound right on red ban) can be made to keep the crosswalk clear for pedestrians here.
Finally, based on feedback we’ve received on social media, we’re keeping an eye on traffic volumes along Yukon and Heather, conflicts at 13th and Cambie, and drivers violating the “do not enter” signage on 10th between Yukon and Cambie. We’re only a short time into this detour, and we hope to see traffic settle into safe and predictable patterns that keep our most vulnerable road users safe.
If you travel through the area regularly and have thoughts or feedback to share, please send us an email at contact@visionzerovancouver.ca.
Vision Zero Vancouver 