Dear Editor:
RE: New e-bike share company Evolve launches in North Vancouver
My husband and I are older and always very concerned about the speed of bikes, especially along the Spirit Trail going through Mosquito Creek marina.
Electric bikes especially are going at dangerously high speeds – 30 kilometres per hour – and one of these days a pedestrian is going to get seriously hurt.
We saw in the North Shore News that the new Evolve rental bikes have a system that will automatically limit speeds going through The Shipyards.
The area for this should be expanded to the Spirit Trail going through the marina.
Any limitation to speed of course only applies to rental bikes.
There should also be a speed limit of 15 km/h for all bikes going through this area.
There are signs to “slow your roll” but these are blatantly ignored.
Needless to say, any restrictions should be enforced.
As it is, there never seems to be any enforcement of laws for cyclists.
I have never seen a cyclist receive a ticket for any violation – be it not wearing a helmet or zooming through a red light at an intersection on a street.
Also we saw that a District of North Vancouver Coun. Jim Hanson wants to bring in a requirement to have a bell on bikes.
This is worth considering.
Of course, this does not mean that dinging a bell requires a pedestrian to throw themselves out of the way.
It should just be a polite alert that a bike is in the area but it is still the cyclist that should slow down and give way, since the bike is the most dangerous element between bike and pedestrian.
We had a visitor from California recently and she told us that where she lives, cyclists always say, “On your left,” or “On your right,” like on the ski hills.
And she was horrified this practice is not used here. It’s common sense and polite.
All of this to say, it is time to change the culture around cycling and accept that bikes represent a danger to pedestrians.
Not to mention our beef that cyclists are not required to have any insurance, and would never be able to compensate someone for injury.
Hazel Baxter
North Vancouver
