Bikes vs. backlash: Whitehorse city council votes to slash speed limit on key street

It's just a short street, under 400 metres long, but Chilkoot Way is the newest political headache for Whitehorse city council.

The street connects two major thoroughfares, Two Mile Hill and Quartz Road, and runs through a complex of strip malls and huge parking lots.

It's also the home to the city's newest bike lane, the Chilkoot Greenway, which serves as a connection between uptown and downtown that cyclists in the city have been pleading for for years.

But that bike lane, and a related bylaw amendment to lower the speed limit for motor vehicles on Chilkoot from 50 km/h to 30, is drawing howls of protest from drivers.

"We think it's a little overboard," said Diana Rothgreb, the organizer of an online petition calling for the city to reconsider.

"We're not against having a bicycle lane but we're worried," she told council Monday. "We're worried that it's just going to become a huger issue as far as safety."

The project includes a two-way bike lane separated from motorized traffic, for now, by road paint and pylons.

But to carve out space for the bike lanes, city crews had to narrow the two vehicle lanes. The city now wants to lower the speed limit to make things safer for cyclists. That has proven to be a tough sell to some drivers, even though the city has already dropped the speed limit to 30 km/h on five other stretches of road.

Mayor Laura Cabott said concrete barriers will be installed "within the next week or two." She said while she's sympathetic to complaints from drivers, the bike lane will stay put.

"What we're doing here on Chilkoot Way ishappening all over the country,has happened in Europe for years and years and years," Cabott said."So it is new to the city of Whitehorse and the residents andI accept that... Change can be difficult and we want to try and implement this in a way that works for people, but this is the way of the future."

Rothgreb told councillors they should put off changing the speed limit until the city consults with the public on aredesign.

"The existing conditions and the design elements that are in the Chilkoot Greenway at the moment, I feel need to be readdressed and redesigned," she said. "Because of this, I feel that jumping the gun on implementing speed change is not required right at the moment."

But councillors voted unanimously in favourMonday on first and second reading of the speed limit bylaw. They're scheduled to vote on third reading Oct. 10.

Coun. Kirk Cameron said residents can expect the city to get more aggressive in rolling out active and public transportation projects.

"If anything, we should be moving toward more of an active transportation way of thinking than to be stuck in this notion that it's all about automobiles," he said. "And this is a starting point."