Get ready for the next round of fighting over the proposed Kitsilano Beach bike path. But first, here’s a brief recap of the issue.
The Vancouver park board approved plans to spend $2.2 million on the construction of the separated Kitsilano Beach bike path in October 2013.
The lane was designed to complete a continuous path from Canada Place to Jericho Beach. After protests from Kitsilano residents and a lawsuit in November 2013, the City of Vancouver agreed to a B.C. Supreme Court injunction halting any construction on the path until a hearing was held.
The B.C. Supreme Court will take a look at the petition that seeks to permanently halt the project on March 12 and 13. The case was brought forward by Kitsilano neighbourhood resident Megan Carvell Davis. Davis’s lawyer, Robert Kasting says the court case will revolve around the terms of a trust agreed upon when the land in question was donated to the city in 1928.
From the Straight:
“The trust says that you should keep the park in its natural state,” Kasting said in a telephone interview. “So the argument is probably going to come down to whether the words of the trust are wide enough to permit what they want to build.”
In defending the path proposed for Hadden and Kitsilano beach parks, the City of Vancouver will therefore have to convince a judge that the proposed bike path would not break its commitment to keep the area “near as possible in its present state of nature”.
Last modified: March 12, 2018
