Stanley Park is a great place for a bike, and there are always super-dooper, spandex-clad guys on racing bikes going by, sixty-year-olds out for a bit of a ride, families with kids, and those dang tourists on tandems!
A tandem is good for lots of things, but it's a good idea if you both know how to ride a bike. They are trickier than they look and although I have had a romantic tandem ride or two in my day, I must say, not for some decades.
In any case, you can rent a tandem by the hour by the entrance to the park. Good luck!
There are lots of bike routes on the roads, but this is an old railway line; one side is for wheeled things and the other is for pedestrians. It is quite long, from the river on the south to False Creek in the north, more or less. Because it is a train route, there are no really steep bits, although it does go up and down.
Of course, it crosses streets and streets cross it and there are bikes and people and cars involved, so there must be signage.
Pedestrians go both ways on the right, bikes go both ways on the left. You can see the shadow of a car on the street in the top left. People do tend to obey the lane system, which is good. The main problem is that on a nice day everyone thinks, "Oh, that walking and biking path, let's go!" and so you have the zooming folk and the kids learning to ride and those who stride briskly and those pushing a wheelchair, all on the same path. Obviously we need more of these!
This helpful sign is on the Cambie St bridge. It was a gloomy day, but not wet. Nice way to show a skidding bike, I guess!
This one says, "Push the button and cross the road." One day I will collect all my button-pushing signs, because they are not all the same. Some of them have just a bike; this one has a rider.
I was actually taking a picture of the concrete architecture and the silly "plaza" below sidewalk level, but of course the coil in front is a bike rack. This is the courthouse, and one day I'll go take more pictures of the West Coast concrete and greenery all around there.
As I have said, there are lots of bike paths on the city streets. There are clear markings like this one, so you know that this cross street is a proper bike route. This is perhaps not very exciting, but such a change from Toronto's attitude to bikes!
They do try to be clear about what is going on. You can see the old bike painted here, but then someone decided that even though it is just a little way, perhaps clearer signs were needed. This is, I believe, an entrance to a little parkette in the West End, where it looks like you are going off the road. (These parkettes have a whole interesting story of their own. One day...)
More traffic calming. The cars can't go here, but we'll let the bikes through. No one has felt the need to paint a yellow line down the middle of this path. Yet.
Sometimes you just have to walk your bike. This is from a place on the Stanley Park seawall where there is a playground, washrooms, food concession... just get off your bike and walk!
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