Metal Drive in Nanaimo: Revisited — Rolling in the City | Streets | Bicycles

Dutch designs, even Dutch levels of ridership during the BC Land Summit bike tour… Catching up on Metral Drive after a year or two, as we take a bike ride through Nanaimo on the new Evo bike share bikes, taking in some multi-use pathways, protected bike lanes, protected intersections and continuous sidewalks and bike paths.

Dutch levels of ridership on Metral Drive passing a continuous sidewalk and bike path

First, the Ferry…

With jet lag from my most recent Dutch trip working in my favour to get up for the early ferry, we begin with a few early morning shots from the boat…

The views were better up on the sundeck and on the other side as the sun begins to light up the mountains.

early morning mountain views from the ferry

Metral Pre-Visit

I’ve posted blogs previously about our ISL Engineering project on Metral Drive, a project we designed while at the same time helping the City with new engineering standards, but I lost that when changing websites, so this was a good opportunity to revisit the corridor a year or two on from construction. The early ferry gave me about an hour to spare before the tour, so I stopped by Metral to see who was using it on this Thursday morning. The first person to roll along the corridor was a younger person presumably going to school. I don’t think he’d be doing that on a bicycle without this project... great to see… Is that the peaks of narrow Dutch homes creating shadows…

boy on a bicycle approaching continuous sidewalk and bike path

Moving along the corridor, not everyone uses the uni-directional bike lanes in the intended direction, not too much of an issue at this point, and this driver easily saw them and let them by anyway. Continuous bike path working as intended, whatever direction you use it…

Not long after, someone came through on a mobility scooter. Metral is way more than a bike lane project, it’s enabling many people to get around by many forms of micromobility.

person on mobility scooter using continuous bike path

Of course continuous sidewalks are made for walking. Prior to the project the street often had no sidewalk, now it continues uninterrupted past many intersections, prioritizing people and their safety at local street intersections.

person walking across continuous sidewalk

Skateboard lanes…

person skateboarding on a protected bike lane

Scooter lanes…

person riding a scooter on a protected bike lane

The photo above was just as I arrived at Turner Road, a stop controlled protected intersection. There are arguments about the best way to do these and surprisingly few examples, but I feel this approach works well, designing it essentially as any other protected intersection with people on bicycles treated more like pedestrians, i.e., having priority, rather than like cars where they’d have to proceed in turn. Here’s a better view…

Even people on drop bars are using the protected bike lanes… Can’t call them roadies…

two people on drop bars riding protected bike lane

Green surface treatment was used on just one of the continuous bike paths where it crosses a commercial driveway… or should I say… where the commercial driveway crosses the continuous bike path…

person on bicycle riding past waiting car

Bike Tour

After that quick stop, it was time for the bike tour which was an excursion for the BC Land Summit attendees and coincided somewhat with the launch of the Evo bike share, which we used for the tour. The bikes worked well with plenty of power to get us where we needed to go. The service appears to be doing well in its first week with lots of curiosity and interest. Hopefully that continues.

The group headed out along Nanaimo’s Front Street bi-directional protected bike lane. It’s always so good to be able to ride to and from the centre of any city to the outskirts on safe routes. This was a great start to the ride. The concrete surfacing at the bus stop is intended to help convey pedestrian priority to and from the bus stop island, a continuous sidewalk to the bus stop you might say… ignoring the actual brick sidewalk in this instance…

We headed along some local roads before joining the E&N…

Which we cross back and forth as we made our way north…

people on bicycles crossing railway tracks

It never occurred to me until this ride that another problem with channelized right turns is a lack of storage capacity…

People on bicycle waiting in pork chop island

Stopping for a short chat about the E&N Trail, the result of a partnership between the City and Rail America for use of the land adjacent to the railroad tracks, and providing a long continuous multi-use pathway across much of the City.

I love these little tactical urbanism touches… more please…

The E&N Trail terminated at Mostar Road, and with the railway continuing westwards away from the urban population and Woodgrove Mall at the north end of town, continuing it was not the most appropriate option. With Metral Drive due for underground utility upgrades and badly in need of surface upgrades from an active transportation perspective a few years ago, it proved the ideal corridor to connect the E&N Trail to the north end of town. Repeating this photo, but it takes me back a week or two to Dutch continuous sidewalks and Dutch levels of ridership. This may not be a regular scene at the moment, but as the bicycle network grows, so too will ridership.

We had limited time to share information on the corridor, but my two highlights… things we did differently were:

The creation of a new street classification system considering the streets link and place function, so rather just the link function (local, collector arterial), we considered the lane use context (mobility, urban, industrial), giving more space to active modes where activity would be higher and also better separating them at the same time, helping better integrate land use and transportation at the street design level.
The continuous sidewalk and bike path, a well proven Dutch technique that had been used sparingly in Canada before this project (Canmore and Vancouver had one or two), but Nanaimo went all in and adopted it as the standard for any collector/local intersection and built them on this project to showcase the standard. This technique is being explored widely across the country after the awards and good press Nanaimo received.

Finally, the Dutch street names flew under the radar until well into this project. A happy coincidence on this Dutch inspired corridor. I’ver never made it to Bergen Op Zoom yet… but next year might be the year…

Afternoon Scenes

After the tour, and with a bit of time to kill before catching the ferry back, I headed back to Metral to see what we’d see in the afternoon, focusing further north than I got in the morning, where there is a signalized protected intersection. Again, we see it working for people on bicycles, but also those on mobility scooters.

people waiting at protected intersection

To speculate for a second, for someone who may struggle on two wheels, say due to balance issues, but who can happily get around on three wheels, protected bike lanes and intersections provide a level of comfort that enables trips that weren’t previously possible. If less able, you’re less likely to want to mix with traffic. Who knows, but like the school kid earlier, I speculate this trip wouldn’t have happened without the Metral project.