Mapping and Measuring Bicycle Facilities Across Canada

from Cycle Therapy - Spring 2022

Go By Bike Week - no longer just for biking to work

Karen Laberee and Colin Ferster

Safe and comfortable bicycle infrastructure encourages cycling and may even increase the diversity of who rides. However, Canada lacks a consistent and complete national dataset of bicycle infrastructure making it challenging to measure access to safe infrastructure by community. Further complicating national metrics, cities refer to their bicycle facilities by a wide variety of names. A scan of 45 Canadian municipalities found 269 unique terms! For example, Vancouver Street’s Neighbourhood Bikeway would be called a “Bicycle Boulevard” in Saskatoon or a “Chaussée Désignée” (Designated Carriageway) in Montreal. To make national comparisons possible, CHATR lab developed the Canadian Bikeway Comfort and Safety (Can-BICS) Classification System as a framework for consistent naming and classification of bicycle infrastructure.

Can-BICS classifies bikeways into three different comfort levels based on transportation engineering design guidelines and cycling safety research. High-comfort bikeways are low-stress routes comfortable for most people and with the best record for safety. These include local street bikeways (e.g., Vancouver St.), cycle tracks (e.g., Fort St.), and bike paths (e.g., bike-only sections of the Galloping Goose). Medium-comfort bikeways are paved multi-use paths (e.g., E&N Regional Trail) that may feel comfortable for some people, but their safety requires careful design. Lowcomfort bikeways are painted bike lanes, which cause higher stress, are comfortable for few people, and offer little to no additional safety. Armed with the CanBICS framework, our team set out to classify the bicycle infrastructure across Canada. While many cities provide open data on their bicycle facilities, the quality and consistency vary tremendously, and some municipalities have no open data. Instead, we used OpenStreetMap (OSM), a volunteered map of the world. OSM has the advantages of being global, consistent, and updated frequently in many urban areas.

The Can-BICS classification was applied to extracted OSM data to create an up-to-date and extensive map of bicycle infrastructure across Canada. An accuracy assessment conducted in 15 test cities using Google Street Maps resulted in methodologies for determining the three Can-BICS categories from OSM data. We put out a mapathon call on Twitter for some fine tuning on OSM in specific cities. The resulting national map measured 23,000 km of bicycle facilities meeting CanBICS standards. Multi-use paths (medium comfort) were most common, followed by painted bike lanes (low comfort).

With the pan-Canadian map-based dataset in place, we built spatial metrics in order to calculate the amount and quality of bicycle infrastructure per Census Dissemination Area (DA). The spatial metrics comprised high, medium, and low-comfort bicycling infrastructure (weighted). We found that ~45% of DAs in Canada had the lowest ranking, indicating that many areas lack bicycle infrastructure. The next step in the project is to apply the spatial metrics in an equity analysis to find out who could benefit from improved infrastructure.

We have designed Can-BICS as an open data project, with public code to facilitate future versions of the bicycle network dataset and Can-BICS metrics as new investments are made or with further mapping to OSM. You can help by mapping bicycle infrastructure on OSM and including details such as path surfaces (paved unpaved) and separation between cyclists and pedestrians.