How to Create a Priority Gap List for Your Community.

What is the Gap Priority List?

The ‘Gap Priority List’ is simply a way for Local Committees to organize their priority routes for improving infrastructure connectedness. It’s a way for committees to decide what the opportunities are for improvement in the cycling network and what the advocacy priorities should be regarding the bike-ability of the network. 

This is a local committee-owned and managed priority list. Committee members decide what routes and neighborhoods are important to their members and which routes would benefit the most from improvements. Essentially, where the committee wants to put its efforts

It’s only as good as data put in by committees.

What is a ‘Gap’?

A gap is any named infrastructure issue that can be defined and associated with criteria relating to safety, utility or usefulness, and feasibility — standard definitions that allow sorting, classification, and ranking.

• Safety refers to what risks are associated with a particular route (e.g. rate of traffic volume, the width or surface conditions of the facility, and even the presence of any cycling dedicated infrastructure etc)

• Utility refers to things such as destinations, local route connections, regional route connections, how direct a route is, how hilly it is, focusing on any cycling done for transport rather than as a sport or leisure activity.

• Feasibility refers to available financial budget, political will, and other things that get at the actual likelihood of having a route built or altered 

While defining gaps is a collaborative committee effort, each LC should nominate a single representative to input the gaps in the spreadsheet; HUB will maintain the full list.  When ever the spreadsheet is updated, we can update the associated map for you.  Often the maps are easiest to share, discuss, and use in your advocacy work.

Keeping gap definitions and scores updated means more opportunities for committees and staff to move them forward in consultation with regional transportation authorities and stakeholders, public relations, and LC knowledge transfer.

What is the Gap Priority List used for?

The Gap Priority List is used for:

1. Tracking of committees’ priorities & gaps that committees are working on getting filled. 

2. Exporting and sharing what are the priority gaps with city staff and other stakeholders. Having a full list of priority gaps, ranked by utility, safety, and feasibility, adds an element of thoughtfulness and data to your priorities when working with staff to get those gaps filled

Integrating  multiple spatial datasets, including our State of Cycling data, and Local Committee Priority Gaps, among others, for the HUB Bike Map Project. Updating this information in a central repository will simplify the move to this new system.

How does the list help you decide what ‘gaps’ to prioritize?

The criteria for ‘scoring’ are a way of differentiating the gaps you have identified, based on the goal of providing safe routes to places that matter.  

Places that matter more to local committee members get higher scores.  Places where making more safety improvements will most likely result in more ridership get higher scores.  Practicality (political will/funding/technically feasible) also differentiates quick wins from longer-term initiatives.

Ridership: Before doing any detailed scoring, you can do a quick evaluation of how many people bike this route (low, medium, or high rider volume) and how it could change. To score this, think about what it would mean to the ridership level if it was fixed? If ridership is currently low and it was fixed, would the levels increase to medium or high? The goal is to get more people cycling more often. If the scoring wouldn’t likely change after this route were to be fixed, why is the Committee working on it? If the scoring here shows a potential increase in people cycling, you can then decide to score the route to rank it against your other priorities.

We  prioritize which gaps we should focus our efforts on by considering the:

Utility of the route: Consider generally whether the route is safe and comfortable to places that matter to the committee.  Does the bike route take you to a town center, school, shopping area, public transit hub, etc?  Does it connect local or regional cycling routes?)

Safety of the route: Consider the before and after picture - If we fix the route, would there be improvements to things like separation for traffic, lighting issues, or better wayfinding? 

There are two ways to evaluate a route’s safety:

1. Look at data on crashes from ICBC (not readily available in most cases)

2. Ask yourself this question: Would you let a 5-year-old or a 90-year-old ride this route as is?

Feasibility score: You can evaluate the feasibility of improving a  route by answering these questions:

1. Is it technically feasible? e.g. Can space be made for it 

2. Is it politically feasible?  E.g Is the political will available from Council to make this happen 

3. Is there some source of funding you can identify? (eg. is there piggyback potential, for example, with a developer? If they are building a new highrise, the developer could pay for biking infrastructure in front of the development while the city covers the rest.)

What is the perceived impact on transportation modes?Will you get pushback if you implement changes (etc., How will community members react if you add a lane or take a bunch of parking spots away)?

These weightings then give us a spectrum of results so that the committee can divide their efforts into shorter-term or longer-term goals towards improvement. 

How do you update the Gap Priority List?

There are three ways to make updates:

1. By email

2. Directly updating the spreadsheet

3. Using the Submission Form Webpage

Visit this page for more details or speak to Cathy Acuna if you or someone on your committee would like individual training on this.

Can I see a Map of the Current Gaps in my community?