Not everyone wants more pickleball courts on the North Shore, it seems, especially when they replace public amenities for cyclists, skateboarders and other wheel-activated athletes.
A skatepark near Horseshoe Bay is the latest to be slated for demolition, after West Vancouver council voted March 10 for district staff to work on designs and cost estimates to replace it with four pickleball courts.
When Ryan Taylor heard of the plan – which also involves removing an overgrown bike dirt jump course and adding a multi-use pump track – he immediate launched an online petition to save the park, which has garnered around 4,000 signatures in less than a week.
Contrary to staff’s report to council that the park is underused, he said the Gleneagles park is a destination for many riders across the region.
“People make the trip out there because they like it for the same reason that I do: It’s very unique. It’s in a very tranquil place. Horseshoe Bay is beautiful. I absolutely love it out there,” said Taylor, who was hired as the park’s first attendant after it opened in 2005, and has been riding BMX bikes for more than three decades.
Also differing from staff’s assertion that the current park isn’t friendly for all ages, he said the bowl design skatepark is good for both young kids and experienced riders.
“It caters to all ages,” Taylor said. “To ride it in the way I do, you would have to have the high level of skill that I do. But you can also just drop in and roll around the bowl.
“I see it all the time. I most recently was the sales manager at the North Shore Bike Park – the indoor bike park at the Capilano Mall that is also going out of business because of pickleball – and I’ve seen kids as young as three years old make it through our advanced jump section there,” he said.
That all starts with little kids wheeling around the pump track section of the park, which Taylor said would be a welcome addition at the Gleneagles destination.
Dirt jump section never properly maintained, petitioner says
One area where he aligned with staff is the need to replace the dirt jump “terrain park,” which he said has never been properly maintained.
“It was a pilot idea. In the middle of the 2000s a lot of city councils thought they could just build a bunch of dirt jumps and just leave them there … but those jumps have been sitting there in a completely unmaintained state for the last 20 years,” Taylor said.
Instead of that dirt section, he suggested a pump track could go in (similar to what district staff have proposed) or a plaza-style skatepark, similar to others on the North Shore.
“Whatever it is, what you put in there is an easier style to ride,” Taylor said.
As a longer-term vision, he envisions the unique park could be a training facility for young riders.
“BMX is in the Olympics now,” he said. “Take these little kids. We can put them on run-bikes. They can go over tiny little bumps, that aren’t going to erode or look dirty, and then they work their way up from doing that.”
Taylor, who lives in Burnaby but continues to work in North Van, said he’s concerned with the larger trend of pickleball displacing destinations for cyclists and skateboarders.
“The North Shore Bike Park is done now, Send Air [indoor park on Vancouver Island] is done, and Gleneagles is on the chopping block, and it all seems to be coming from the same place,” he said. “There are tens of thousands of park users in this area who are extremely upset with what Pickleball Canada is trying to do, and we are all organizing together to stop them.”
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