Vancouver Sun on cycling

Cycling: Beware the door prize. This part really jumped out at me (emphasis added):

Vancouver has about 170 kilometres of designated bicycle network -- roads that cars must share with bicycle traffic. Most outlying municipalities do not have such networks.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that bicycles were permitted on all city streets? And therefore all city streets are shared by all road users? There is nothing special about the designated bicycle network in this regard. The real differences between a designated bicycle street and other residential streets are the traffic calming and the cyclist-activated traffic lights at busy cross-streets.

So I'm not really sure what the author (Randy Shore) is getting at when he says that the designated bicycle streets in Vancouver are distinguished by the fact that cars must share them with bicycles. It's likely that he is not getting at anything in particular. This is probably just another example of ambiguous and imprecise language in a newspaper. Not exactly surprising or shocking.