A rider takes the bike lift up a hill in Trondheim, Norway. (Design Management)

The City of North Vancouver is looking into building a special lift to get bikes and their riders up a steep hill on Lonsdale Avenue.

Mayor Darrell Mussatto said the idea is to help people get out of their cars and onto their bikes.

"I'm really about sustainability and giving people options from the use of their car, and the biggest problem we have here is our hills on the North Shore," said Mussatto.

The lift would start near the SeaBus terminal and head up Lonsdale Avenue about one kilometre to Keith Road, said Mussatto.

The world's first and perhaps only bike lift is in Trondheim, Norway, which has carried more than 220,000 cyclists uphill since it was installed in 1993.

Users in Trondheim slide a prepaid keycard into a machine to pay for their trip up the escalator. They then sit on their bikes as a footplate slides out in a track alongside the road, and they put out their right foot on the footplate and get pushed up the hill.

North Vancouver bicycle commuter Amir Asgari said the idea sounds like a winner. Every day, the North Vancouver resident huffs and puffs about a dozen blocks up Lonsdale Avenue on his commute home.

"You kind of mumble to yourself as your grind up the hill, 'Ah man, this is crazy,'" said Asgari.

Initial estimates put the cost of building the bike escalator at more than $1.5 million, but so far there is no formal proposal on the project — just plans to do more research, a process which could take months, even years just to get to the planning stage.

North Vancouver is not the only municipality in the Lower Mainland considering a bike lift — the nearby City of New Westminster is doing its own study on installing some kind of a bike lift as well.