The City of Winnipeg continues to test out protected bike lanes on a couple of streets.

This week, adjustable curbs were installed on Sherbrook Street and Bannatyne Avenue.

The City of Winnipeg's active transportation coordinator Stephanie Whitehouse says the objective is to gauge how the materials work (in winter and spring) and how people feel about it.
"We are testing them for nine months and at that time we'll gauge whether or not they will remain and how they worked and how they weathered, and how our street's maintenance can operate with them, and what the public thought," she says.

Temporary pop-up bike lanes were tested earlier this summer and the city collected feedback. Whitehouse says the general consensus from cyclists is they do appreciate protection, but the city sometimes hears from road users that the extra protection reduces the width of the road. These curbs are not built into the road, instead held in place with steel pins, which allows for some fine-tuning if needed.

"One of the things that we will be doing with this is getting emergency services to come out, because of course they have large vehicles, fire trucks are quite wide, so we want to make sure that they can navigate space with those, and if needed, if they need to drive over those curbs we want to make sure that they can do that as well."

Whitehouse says one of the first tests with these adjustable curbs was how easily they could be deployed. She says 100 metres of curb was installed on Sherbrook in about three hours, and it took less time on Bannatyne.