It’s a long title, but this is me trying to keep it concise. I moved and got my Canadian work permit approved at Calgary airport on April Fool’s Day 2026, which is about one month. I’ve learned a bit since coming here, so I am aiming to keep this focused by narrowing it down to three key learnings concerning getting a bike and using it for transportation to get places in Vancouver (I go elsewhere for a job in mid-May). Hopefully you find it transferable to your own life, or at least find it a fun read. Enjoy!
Vancouver bike co-ops are great, but be prepared to have to take what is there and not be too picky
On the advice of friends, I got a bike from Kickstand Vancouver, I think on 3 or 4 April. I wasn’t too sure what to expect but I knew I was really sick of waiting for the bus and wanted the freedom to scoot around places like I was used to. Yes, I could use Facebook Marketplace (the Vancouverite’s favourite) or eBay but to be honest I just wanted to go somewhere, try a bike out, be fairly sure it was mechanically all there and just bring it home, especially bearing in mind as an immigrant with one suitcase, I had no tools. I found the opening times for Kickstand Vancouver and turned up. I really like Kickstand and think it’s a precious resource, but there’s no two ways about it, it is a matter of just turning up and seeing what there is. It isn’t a big name bike shop, you aren’t going to get to stroll down lines of bikes your size and luxuriate over what you’d like to ride away on. And to be honest, this wasn’t a big problem. I had in mind getting some kind of steel-framed, fendered commuter bike, and instead rolled away with an alloy Giant OCR in a pleasing cherry red, which has been an absolute blast to ride around on.
I paid $450 CAD, which is about £225. I am well aware that ‘you can get it cheaper on Facebook’, but this didn’t require me to make arrangements with someone on the internet, I got to ride it and others around the block, and it was an immaculate condition ‘barn find’ donated to Kickstand, and all the money goes towards keeping the lights on at the co op. I’m very happy to have paid that much. There is something a little funky going on with the headset and stem, specifically that a threadless headset converter is in there, but it rides great and isn’t so valuable that I don’t feel I can’t lock this up outside a store. This may not be the last post about it.
The point I am labouring towards is that I didn’t have the OCR in mind when I went to Kickstand. It’s just what jumped out at me when I was there. I warmly invite you to take a similar attitude, because I’m having a great time with it. It even copes with the BC hills OK, using the mighty Sora-ace triple front mech. I rode out of Kickstand whistling the theme tune of the Tour de France as I rode home, and that is what counts.
Vancouver bike infrastructure is improving, but it is clearly a fringe transportation mode for most people
Coming from a famously mean town and doing an admittedly quite hazardous job using cargo cycles, I feel very at ease cycling in Vancouver. There are bike lanes in Vancouver, and some modal filtering of side streets to keep them ‘traffic calmed,’ as per the City of Vancouver’s Transportation 2040 plan, but you do still need to beware of dozy drivers especially at junctions, which are often just four-way stop signed intersections, and at the end of the day, you are at their mercy. I think in my second week, at around 4.30 pm, a very low-speed driver went straight into the back of me at a red light, giving me a light ‘bump’ from behind. They were very apologetic. Maybe they were on their phone, which was on a holder in their windscreen, who’s to say. I guess I got lucky. Hopefully, nothing like that will happen to me again. But given this occurred within my first month in the country, I am not enormously optimistic.
Anyway, there’s no two ways about it, like London UK, cycling is very clearly ‘only for the brave’ in this town. We are absolutely out here but the usage of buses and driving a car is clearly dominant. There’s no underground or light rail outside of the ‘Skyrail’ which isn’t near where I live. So it is either drive a car, wait a long while for the bus, walk, or stick your neck out and cycle. The bike lanes here are quite indirect, and much less of a ‘straight shot’ into town than what I’ve been used to using. I get places on two wheels and will confidently mix it up with the big cars on the ‘stroads,’ at least going downhill, but there is no doubt that I don’t feel at home there. Signposting is frankly non-existent. I have no idea how to navigate this town safely. I know that routes do exist, but I don’t know how to find one, get on it, or where it will take me. I do think the Dutch system of numbering some key junctions and saying ‘this route goes to junction [eg] 5’ is the way to go, because some of them are very vague and not very helpful for my navigational needs. I don’t like to write entire articles moaning, they are getting used, and the direction of travel is positive.
In the city’s position, I would speed this up by low-traffic-neighbourhood-ing specific streets. Basically, you can drive in and out of areas, but not through them. This does exist in some localities here, so it isn’t unheard of. This way, streets are not rat-runned through by motorists and the main tranche of traffic stays on ‘straight shot streets’, and drivers don’t make turns on junctions/intersections, which is where they are the most likely to mistakenly kill or maim someone. Putting in a lane with concrete protections is hard work and expensive. By comparison, LTN-ing a locality is very cost effective and quick to do.
One last thing on this; living in London really spoiled me electric bikeshare wise. There is such a thing as ‘Mobike’, which is a public bike-borrowing share not unlike Santander cycles, but these are heavy ‘acoustic’ bikes only, and you wouldn’t want to use them as daily drivers or for anything strenuous or hilly. We do have Limes here, but they are scooters only, and the ‘red zone’ for Limes here is huge, so the days of a moderately tipsy Lime ride home are long gone for me at the present. There is also the matter of mandatory head armour (or maybe that should now be ‘armor’). I am keeping this article short as I don’t want to write a novel, but it does irk me. As far as I’m concerned, you should have the freedom to ride a bike dressed in the outfit you intend to wear upon arrival. From what I can see, prosecution here is highly selective, with many scooter riders not wanting to put something other people have had on their heads on, so I am guessing it is legislation used by the police to crack down on people they don’t like. That’s all I have to write up right now.
I don’t rightly know what the next 10 or 20 years holds for riding a bike, infrastructure-wise, in Vancouver, but you can do a lot worse than what we have, that is for sure.
Not many cargo bikes here but plenty of trailers
Lastly, I’ve noticed that there is a lot of trailer use here instead of outright cargo bikes compared to London UK. I’ve become used to seeing cargo bikes widely where I’ve moved from, but here they are a rarity. I am not 100% on why this is. It could be that the UK cycle-to-work scheme incentivises people to get one on finance more than happens here. It could also be that people enjoy having a regular electric bike and can just plonk a trailer on it as and when, rather than owing a cargo bike outright. I was a bit surprised as I thought bigger houses would mean more space to have such bikes in, but they are eluding me. I haven’t seen equivalents here of ‘Flying Dutchman’ or ‘London Green Cycles’, maybe people think if they’re going to carry things a given distance they may as well just have a car. Maybe that’ll change in the next decade or two.
Should it change? Maybe not for hauling things as in objects, but for people I do think it is preferable to have passengers out in front where they can be observed by the pilot, and not driven straight into from behind by a motorist playing Pokémon go at the wheel and not paying any attention.
Ends
That’s it for me in this read. Emigrating is really hard and my life really went upside down throughout this process. But bikes are a constant and I’m always going to stop and gawp at them whenever they roll by. Thanks for reading, and do roll around Vancouver if you ever visit, it really is the only way to travel.
Calum On Wheels 