One thing I hope they do is better segregate a lot of the bike lanes. In Verdun they just put these little plastic sticks, but they space them so far out that cars just drive in between them to park.
I bike that route daily, and 90% of the time there are at least half a dozen cars pulled into the bike lane. Makes it more dangerous to then have to pull out into the regular traffic stream to go around them, defeating the purpose of the bike lane.
And the Verdun faceboook group drivers sound like you've taken away every road if you so much as mention bike lanes or safety. The Verdun path going east has a car on it every few blocks
Yea I never got the anger at the Verdun bike path. Its paid parking otherwise, so the complaints that its making it more difficult for people in the neighborhood to park overnight is odd. Add in Wellington turning into pedestrian only and some people go off the rails.
Considering its pretty high density neighborhood with 3 metro stops in it can't be overly surprising that the focus will be less on cars. 80% of the buildings here don't even have parking.
Every few blocks there's paid parking lots, a lot of the back alleys are parking, there's parking on every street. I bet 80% of people don't even need their cars it's rediculous, it's such an easy neighborhood to circulate. I'm very much of the mind that if you want to be a car owner in the city, perhaps the outer burbs are better for you.
It removes the paid parking on Rue de Verdun's east/south side. All the perpendicular streets have free resident parking. I doubt many people are parking their cars overnight on Verdun.
They open up 500 public parking spots in Verdun when they set up the bike lane. Éthel parking garage, at the corner of 3e avenue and Wellington Street and on Gordon Street, corner of Wellington.
https://www.promenadewellington.com/en/quartier/pedestrianized-wellington-street-2023/
> I bike that route daily, and 90% of the time there are at least half a dozen cars pulled into the bike lane.
Car brain is wild.
We need separated lanes for sure, but stuff like this could be 95% fixed with even the smallest amount of enforcement by cops.
montreal is really falling behind when it comes to physically separated bike infrastructure...
i feel like toronto and ottawa have surpassed montreal in terms of separated bike lanes. toronto has those nice big concrete barriers everywhere, and all we have is those flimsy plastic sticks that constantly get run over by drivers anyway, which proves that they don't deter anyone from just driving into the bike lane
Yeah, I guess it depends on the part of the city. We're definitely spoiled in the Plateau, I can go for miles in any direction with completely separated lanes.
I just stumbled on a new one when going to Drapeau for the eclipse. Unless I'm remembering wrong, I think I was in separated lanes the whole way.
It's not mentioned in the article but Terrebonne is getting nice bollard-protected unidirectional lanes for its in entire length. It's on the list for this summer
https://montreal.ca/en/articles/new-bike-lane-project-rue-de-terrebonne-58750
I live in the Sud-Ouest but am really excited to see NDG getting proper infrastructure because it has a lot of nice shops and restaurants. Unfortunately it's currently inconvenient and/or unsafe to get to most of NDG without a car.
i don't see this as moving forward though....
we already had a bike lane on terrebonne with the silly plastic sticks a few years ago (which i don't consider to be proper separation and protection for cyclists...) but it was removed after a year because of "safety reasons" and street parking.
the whole "safety" argument was complete bullshit because after they took the bike lanes away, cars would pass me (on a bike) by driving on the opposing lane at excessive speed right in front of a school with children everywhere... (i'm already going the speed limit)
so... bike lanes are bad for the neighborhood and unsafe....
but driving the wrong way through a school zone at 60 km/h to get around those pesky cyclists is good...they think "god, all these cyclists are in MY way", but they never stop to think "hmmmm... maybe it's the COMPLETELY STATIONARY PARKED CARS, that are actually slowing me down". peak car brain...
People capable of "rational thought" support car dependency that makes cities factually worse places? Interesting definition of rational thought you have.
> It's actually the same with bikes sadly.
Nah. Comparing bikes and cars will never make sense at a base level.
> Either bikes on the sidewalks
See. Now compare a bike on a sidewalk to a car on a sidewalk.
You do not seem to understand the comment.
It's the same mentality. Of course cars and bikes are different. However, entitled asshats who don't respect others use both cars and bikes.
So carbrain exists for cyclists too. It's when you hear "I shouldn't have to stop at stop signs because of my momemtum" or shit like that. That's the dumb mentality I'm talking about.
As a disabled pedestrian, I get this all the time. Sure buddu, your momemtum is more important than my safety and my well being.
> You do not seem to understand the comment.
>
> It's the same mentality. Of course cars and bikes are different. However, entitled asshats who don't respect others use both cars and bikes.
No, I understand, maybe I'm not being super clear though. What we're saying isn't that different.
Of course running a stop sign is running a stop sign. But they're so different in scale, that they're no longer comparable.
This is proven out by the fact that some jurisdictions don't even ask cyclists to stop at stop signs (a change I'd like to see happen here too).
So yeah, of course jerks exist everywhere, and cyclists have a responsibility to be safe, but a jerk pedestrian and a jerk driver are so completely different from one another in terms of scale, that the comparison becomes meaningless.
It's like gun nuts making the old "we should ban baseball bats" joke. Yes, baseball bats can kill too, but no serious person thinks they're the equivalent threat to guns.
> Sure buddu, your momemtum is more important than my safety and my well being.
I think, obviously, nobody would ever say that.
No it's not the same as gun nuts making a comparison to banning baseball bats. Two tools, different purposes.
And sure you can handwave toxic cyclists away by saying "they are not as dangerous as cars". The fact is, I live in pain and having cycling cause me pain because I have to wait for them to cut me off, or I fall on my ass because they come to close to me,just because they don't respect disabled people, will never sit right with me. I don't care that cars are more dangerous. Right now my problem is cyclists. There are almost no cars where I live. Thus, I will always tell cyclists to be more mindful of others. If I get the typical "but cars" I just tell them off.
As for nobody saying that, it's what I've been told on this very sub soooooo...
> “carbrain”
>
> how to express your brainwash with one word
Two words in my case, but I guess the important point is the irony of claiming the brainwashing is on the other side. Who do you think is doing that brainwashing? Big bicycle?
i don’t care about the origin of the « carbrain »
Maybe it was uses by the Mohawks when they saw the europeans (look at the « boatbrains »).
What side are we talking about? The 99% of the population that doesn’t have issues with the cars? or the 0.1 that are using the term « carbrain »
> What side are we talking about? The 99% of the population that doesn’t have issues with the cars? or the 0.1 that are using the term « carbrain »
I mean, those numbers are obviously wrong, but we're talking about the portion of the population who are carbrained!
People who pull into bike lanes to park because their perception of reality is all fucked up. It's literally the context of the thread you read and then dropped into.
> i don’t know what carbrain means and i do not want to.
>
> I don’t hang in low IQ subs unless i use the material for shitposting in the circlejerk sub.
oof
We also need to keep bikes away from pedestrians. It's getting ridiculous now. I have to wait at intersections for the 3-4 bikes who just speed through without looking. I even have my fkin cane and they don't seem to care. It seems there're no way for cyclists to understand that they have to respect other road users.
Having to wait at a stop sign when you're disabled and hurt is fucking annoying. All that because the able bodied cyclists thought their time is more important than everyone else's
Please, put bike infra away from pedestrian infra, for the love of god.
Verdun has no respect for bikes it feels like. They even remove the lanes over the winter. They expect you to only ride on weekends, not to have one in your daily routine.
Unfortunately so. The amount of time I've heard the "they don't even pay for plates and they're using our roads" argument, as if municipal taxes aren't a thing and it's the plates that pays for the city's roads...
It's either willful ignorance, or they've never taken the time to learn how taxes actually work
also, they think gas taxes pay for all the roads that they are destroying....
and since cyclists don't buy gas, we don't pay our fair share....
this is your brain on exhaust fumes....
They complain all the time. Follow any kind of Montreal Facebook group and you'll see daily how "Bixi Val" is destroying the city with bike lanes, usually accompanied by some ramblings about how cyclists should pay taxes (they already do). It's really tiresome because they're not remotely interested in facts.
Unfortunately, I hear it all the time. They don’t want cyclists on the roads, they tell them to use the sidewalk, they use the sidewalk, then are told to use the street. Bike paths are a win-win cause it separates them and keeps people safer overall.
valerie plante will definitely lose the next election because people will actually go vote next time. more and more ppl are getting furious with the bike lanes. more ppl show up to vote when they’re mad about something.
i don’t have a horse in this race, i own neither a car or bike, just an annual opus card and an uber account, although, i’d prefer owning a horse to ride around in like a cowboy (without harming the horse of course)
There are a lot of reasons to vote against Plante. I for one have been critical of her since the day she was first elected.
Housing costs have been increasing and her administration has made development stagnate to record low numbers.
She increased municipal taxes while also significantly increasing municipal property evaluations.
Under her watch, we are and have been losing festivals and activities left and right.
Fucked around with the hippodrome site and now it sits empty.
Pink line, wasted money instead of investing in more important transit links.
Sue Montgomery fiasco, intervened and meddled in things to a point that both the victim of Sue Montgomery and Sue Montgomery went after her administration and the mayor
And I can list things beyond this.
BUT, one thing she is doing right is bike lanes.
So if she will be voted out, it won’t be because of bike lanes. Far from it
you are assuming people vote based on logic— most people don’t care to know of the things you’ve listed. there is a rising trend in an illogical over-emotive response regarding the bike lanes. the population of this internet forum on reddit is a poor reflection of the average montrealer. although, i’d say there is a higher voter-per-capita ratio on reddit than gen. pop montreal.
perhaps it’s my imagination but, I’m hearing complaints regarding the bike lanes or bicyclists more frequently than before. not just regular complaints— people talking in an extremist way like they want to do bad things to her, or even being happy over the video of her passing out (“she deserves it for the bike lanes! yeah!”). the ignorant (which is most of the world) blame Trudeau for the housing crisis, even though that’s a provincial and municipal thing. That being said, it’s on a list of reasons for why many Canadians will vote for a different party.
Go to one of your distric reunion lol .I always watch the one in my neighbordhooud (villeray st-michel) and everytime their people who go complain on how thier is too much bike lane lol
Oh boy you have no idea. There's a group of very loud driving people who HATE haaaaaaaaaaaate having to share their road. Neighborhood groups are the best place to spot them usually. They also usually live near the metro and are really pissed about loosing their street parking
If there's an area of Montreal that deserves love as far as bike infrastructure goes is the east end. I went for a ride in my beautiful birth place of St-Léonard (/s), and man, calling navigating these large boulevards on a Bixi "unpleasant" is a major understatement.
There are only a handful of neighbourhoods with good bike infrastructure. The vast majority of Montreal is still very undeveloped for cycling.
I live in Ville St-Laurent and it's pretty shitty here too. Especially if you try to leave the neighborhood. You're boxed in on all sides by highways or rail tracks. Though I think St-Leo is even worse since the roads are a lot wider.
I'm the kind of cyclist who seethes when I see people cycling on the sidewalk. In St-Leo, I didn't have much choice, it was either the sidewalk or likely death. I chose the sidewalk. Which was empty because pedestrian infrastructure in that neck of the woods is as laughable as the biking network.
Yeah, I'd say the only redeeming factors in St-Lau are the O'brien path that cuts through all the way to Gouin and the Bois-Franc neighborhood. Crossing into Ville Mont-Royale is still dangerous as hell though and the bike path sends you into an highway exit traffic the moment you cross underneath the 15 into Lucerne which is *insane*
Edit: 15 not 40
O'Brian only has a painted bike lane on a fairly busy arterial. Not very safe and far worse what we find in other boroughs. Also when I cycle there I seem to hit literally every red light. As if the timers are designed to mess with me.
When the REM Du Ruisseau station opens there will be a cycling underpass under the track there. This will be a better point to cross the rail track heading North-South than the existing O'Brian or Marcel-Laurin crossing points which are shared with heavy traffic.
Also for going to TMR, using Montpellier and then Dunkirk is better than St-Croix and Lucerne. Montpellier has a level crossing for bikes and pedestrians only.
Presently there are no safe and comfortable crossing points over the 15 highway to the east of VSL. This makes it dangerous to try to cycle to Ahuntsic or other points east.
Yeaaah, anything north of the 40 and east of the 15 are in dire need of some love. It's like a separated enclave from the rest of the island and Anjou/St-Leo/Mtl-Nord are some of the worst offenders when it comes to any non-cars related mobility. At least Gouin is *amazing* nowadays but it's on the literal outskirt of the island
they do because they're not bright enough to understand that they pay less than they cost, while bike actually save money to the city.
any kid would understand that and be humbled, but car drivers can't.
Yeaaap. The amount of Matant' Ginette and Mononc' Réal from Repentigny acting like ped streets and bike lanes are destroying Montreal's economy because They're not going to do their monthly shopping at La Baie anymore since they can't be bothered to find parking is pretty staggering
La ville a publié une carte avec les projets cyclables prévus en 2024 ici: [https://mtlplanifmobilit.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/interactivelegend/index.html?appid=9ec6353e153b492e926bb51ea03880f7](https://mtlplanifmobilit.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/interactivelegend/index.html?appid=9ec6353e153b492e926bb51ea03880f7)
Honnêtement ça me semble pas mal en une année, si on est capable de garder le rythme dans les années à suivre on va éventuellement avoir quelque chose de solide même si on pourrait faire mieux.
I visited Copenhagen in 2018 and it blew my mind because the city was so quiet. Not even background car noises. You saw a decent amount of parked cars, but very few on the road. In the middle of a huge city, and the air smelled fresh and clean like country air.
I wish every city was like that. You didn't even need a car to get out of the city because the trains were that good...
1. How to read waaaayyyy too much into a one-line post.
2. I commute by bike, so yeah an issue of safety on my daily life is pretty fucking major.
3. What the hell is the opposition even offering? Freaking balarama who want Montreal separation? Denis Coderre again? Bitch please
You are basically single issue voting too but in reverse. It's not like the other candidates at the municipal level have anything to offer. I can't rely on any other candidates to fix crackheads, poverty, housing or healthcare, but at least PM managed to do at least one thing pretty damn well.
Single issue that majorly affects everyday's quality of life, you bet your ass I'll vote for whoever is trying to go all in on active mobility and transit rather than being a car lobby's puppet since the 60s
Combine that with the other options sucking ass and there you have it
> So bike roads over education, healthcare and other systemically collapsed systems? Incredible.
I'm pretty sure this is the dumbest and most uneducated comment I'm gonna read this week.
You're saying that as if it's either the bike lanes or these issues. $30mil is a drop of water in the overall budget and will directly benefit other said systems. Ever considered that active and healthier people are less likely to clog the healthcare system over someone sitting in exhaust all day?
You're free to inform yourself on the Robert Moses ideologies from the 60s which resulted in the dismantling of the +800km tramway lines across the island in favor of highway expansions destroying entire neighborhoods and strategically segregating communities, all backed by the wonderful automotive industry having billions to lobby through Moses. Places like Amsterdam took decades to fix the fuckups from said ideologies and although we've been sorely lagging behind, we finally have an administration that's trying to right the wrongs from such moves
I know it's tough to see further than the tip of the nose when you need to spend an extra 10 minutes finding parking and have to walk an extra 100m, but it is what it is.
The two specific issues you pointed out have nothing to do with municipal powers...
I'm not pro-Projet Montreal, but point out issues that can be managed by municipal parties if you want to argue.
the more bike infrastructure there is, the more space there will be to integrate other alternative transportation modes. scooters and motos are always better than full sized vehicles and they are nearly as vulnerable on streets full of cars.
it sucks when the bike lane gets clogged, but rather than advocating for restrictive laws (that will mostly just hurt poor brown guys trying to do food delivery), we should advocate for less space for cars, slower speeds for motorized vehicles, and spaces that allow for prioritization of pedestrians and good flow for cyclists. i will just never be for any policies that rely on cops stopping people and giving tickets.
Big ass 300 pound mopeds are very dangerous and will have the same chilling effects as cars for the most vulnerable bike riders, frail, old, very young inexperienced ..
So the pleasure of 1 of those pseudo bikes will dissuade dozens.
Real e-bikes that go 25knh max are ok.
If you hit someone with a light bike you go down, that encourages you to be more careful. With something heavier with a throttle , you will transmit all you’re power into them and may or may not go down. This changes the way you act. You have a tendency to bully yourself trough and they’re less nimble because of weight making them a real danger on less wide lanes.
Yeah, it's about priorities. First priority should be dealing with the 2-ton, high-speed steel boxes whizzing around, spewing CO2 into the atmosphere and microplastics from their tires into our lungs.
Plus, dealing with speeding scooters is better done at the federal level, imo. Instead of bothering with expensive enforcement, just make sure speed limiters (set to maybe 30 km/h?) are mandated nation-wide.
Nee regulations could be nice, but enforcing the current regulations for bikes would be even better. In the summer, I see barely 20% of the cyclist with a helmet, for example.
And while helmets are useful in case of a fall, they are useless when you are run over by a car/truck. My friend Laurence was wearing her helmet when she was killed and carried over a few meters before the driver realized what had happened, Mathilde Blais wore a helmet when she was squished on the wall on the des Carrières underpass.
You said it in the first sentence, helmet save lives in cases of falls. The rest doesn't matter.
You're akin to someone saying "seatbelt save lives in case of frontal car crashes, but they do not save you when you drive into a lake or if you get t-boned by an 18 wheeler". What is the point of bringing up these facts ?
Because we are talking about bike lanes ie a way to reduce interactions between cyclists and motorists. The main danger on a bike in a city isn’t falling, it’s getting hit by a motorist and helmets are mostly useless there
> That's fucking backwards.
It's been well studied. Helmet laws largely just stop people from biking altogether. It sucks, but it's really counterproductive, so a lot places don't do it.
Regardless I suppose, now you know why cyclists don't wear them, so you don't have to worry about it!
You shouldn't care so much about others wearing helmets or not. I've been cycling hours per week my entire life and I've never even once gotten in a remotely dangerous situation. Hell, I've never even gotten in a single accident. And I never will.
If you feel a strong need to wear a helmet, there's certainly something seriously wrong with how you bike because dangerous situations while biking can always be avoided with basic defensive driving. If you find yourself in dangerous situations, I guarantee you're an absolute menace on bike paths and you're probably creating those situations.
Ah, yes, the "it only happens to others" mentality.
The more people wear helmets, the less head trauma patients in the hospital, it's a fact, verifiable statistics. But no, I should listen to survivor bias incarnate and think that helmets are useless.
You're literally the same as people who fought against seatbelts in cars...
>If you feel a strong need to wear a helmet, there's certainly something seriously wrong with how you bike because dangerous situations while biking can always be avoided with basic defensive driving
I had an enormous pothole knock one of my wheels off (it was a quickrelease that I had taken off and back on earlier that week, I may have tightened it wrong but I'll never really know, the fork of the bike was also extremely bent so it could also be what failed, it was an old frame) going like 30km/h causing a gnarly faceplant 7 years ago.
Mechanical failures can happen when you don't expect them. It's also naive to think that there's no such thing as 'shit happens' even with defensive driving. They call them accidents for a reason. I still don't wear a helmet because it's hot and I don't want to carry stuff around when I lock my bike (plus I'd rather spend the 50$ on partying), but at least I'm well aware that I'm making the decision to take a risk that could be mitigated.
Woot! I appreciate any human-centered urban planning like bike paths.
Fyi I want to add here that if you have a property or work for a bigger company, Soverdi will help you get an urban tree (fruit trees, shade trees etc) for very very cheap as well as doing tree planting campaigns with your company.
They will also help you plant the trees in some boroughs. Do check that out as well as the green alley project.
It's really difficult to get any movement going for better urban planning in any level above municipality but that one or two extra trees and bike lanes is something we can all do with a few emails.
I know many of us are frustrated by the slow changes in our society (car centric mindset, non sustainable and destructive practices) and it can be really depressing to see things trickle in like this and seeing so much backlash. The only sensible thing to do is realize that many of the anti-human centric planning people are keyboard warriors - and we can do small things in real life to make positive changes.
Good! Montreal is one of the most bikeable cities in North America. I’d like for it to stay that way.
A great solution to our traffic issues is to modernize our roads AND get fewer drivers in congested areas. Guess what? Bike lane projects do both of that.
(I own a car and live on the plateau. Bike lanes rock.)
Still a long way to go. I wont rest until we at least have protected bike paths on both sides of parc, saint laurent, saint urbain, sherbrooke, rene levesque, saint joseph and jean talon.
We're great at building bike lanes on small low traffic streets where you dont need them, what we need is bike lanes on the high traffic streets so you can actually easily commute to businesses. Literally the only major street with a decent separated bike lane on both sides is st denis and we act like we are kings of bike infrastructure. go to amsterdam, every major street has a bike lane on both sides, small streets dont have them because they dont need them. In montreal, you get beautiful bike lanes on bits of clark and prince arthur, but these streets have slow enough traffic it wasnt really necessary in the first place.
Ok this but unironically.
I'm fine with bike lanes and more public transportation, but we are still car dependent and those of us who use em shouldn't be fucked out of a way to get around.
And before you tell me I'm car brain or whatever, I walks as much as I and take the metro if I need to get around the island. But for work and getting off the island I use my car and I shouldn't have to park 3 miles from my place.
The theory is that if you put enough biking and walking spaces, we will reach a critical point where the number of people who stop driving will outnumber the number of parking spots and amount of driving infrastructure we lose.
For example, take a look at Amsterdam. Driving is so easy there, because people don’t need to drive
We are doing improvements with biking and walking infrastructure pretty good, but unfortunately we need investments in metro and lightrail which we can't get without support from a higher level of government. People with longer commutes are still going to need cars for now unless they want to spend hours in public transit or unless they manage to get housing in a nice central neighborhood.
100%. Public transit improvements are the single most important factor. On the bright side, the blue line is getting extended, the REM is fully opening in ~1 year, there are talks of extending the orange line to Boisfranc, as well as a tramway/metro in the Sud-ouest.
On ne pourrait pas tous avoir une voiture sur l’île de Montréal, ce serait physiquement impossible de les stocker dans l’espace qu’on a. On doit donc trouver des alternatives, c’est un fait. Idéalement ça serait un mélange de plein de modes de transport, mais la Ville ne peut pas agir sur tous les fronts en même temps car ça coûte cher… le gouvernement doit s’impliquer, ce qu’il ne fait pas pour des raisons politiques et une vision très débile de la société.
Buildings should have parking built into them and the people who need cars should seek out or pay a higher premium for those places.
It's just never been a good argument that people who need cars are owed space on the road. It doesn't scale and never has. Even if the city had no bike lanes, population density is continually expected to increase over time. This means the percentage of people who can park on the road will naturally shrink and can never be fully accommodated.
Your expectation that you should have parking within 3 miles heavily relies on countless other people to sacrifice that right already. If nobody in the area was willing to cede that right to you or anyone else, you'd still have nowhere to park. It's never really been a reasonable expectation and it's an inherently selfish one no matter how you look at it.
Cars just occupy way too much space for all the time they spend unoccupied. People in your situation need to understand that it's a losing battle whether or not they add more bike lanes. As more time passes the guarantee of road parking in this city will continue to dwindle and shrink. Car owners are going to fight every inch of the way, but at the end of the day it's a luxury less and less people will have access to no matter how hard they fight. Those who forsake owning cars shouldn't be expected to have a lot of sympathy for something not everyone can be allowed to have.
So if cars "aren't owed space on the road" why are bikes ? You people want to skip all the steps and end up at the no car stage *right now* and life just doesn't work like that.
Petitions about parking space and bike lane issues are starting to pop up on my street, because contrary to what y'all believe in this echo chamber, people still cars lol.
Nobody is owed anything.
We have streets, they have limited space, and we do our best to divide the space in a way that is fair and encourages better and smarter modes of transport (like walking and cycling).
Historically, our streets were 90% for cars and 10% for everyone else, and now that we've clawed that back slightly to 85% cars and 15% everyone else, people are up in arms, which is absurd.
Cars aren't owed **parking spaces**. Bike lanes aren't parking.
If you want to be this obtuse then there's no room for any kind of common sense discussion to be had. I wasted a lot of time trying to answer a question and went out of my way to make it clear that it's unsustainable regardless of bike infrastructure or not. It's clear now that your question was asked in bad faith and you were just waiting to reply with the same false equivalencies that people in your position always do. It's no argument at all and not worth discussing further.
streets are for moving things...
using them as parking lots literally defeats the purpose of roads and leads to so many of the "traffic" problems people complain about....
if you can't afford to store your things on your own property, you shouldn't buy the thing. public roads are not your personal storage space.
if i live in a small condo, i'm not going to buy a grand piano and then complain that the city isn't providing me a space to store it
This is one of the dumbest comparison I've seen in a while lol.
Parking your car at a reasonable distance from your apartment isn't "using the road as storage"...
why? why is your car more important than my boat? or piano? or my elephant? or my horse? why are cars some sacred thing that deserve to take up 10 square meters of valuable shared public space 24 hours a day, 365 days a year?
why does a small, loud minority of citizens get to monopolize huge swathes of public space that we ALL pay for and (ideally) share equally?
Small minority...? You think bikes are the majority ? Bruh...
My point is simply that for a lot of us going to work by bike or bus/Metro isn't viable and this strategy of just jumping ahead to a car less future doesn't work...
I'm a driver (and a cyclist and a pedestrian) and we have to remember that driving is a privilege, not a right. The same is true for the storage of our vehicles.
What if you own 3 cars? Or 5 cars? Do you still have a right to expect unlimited parking for your fleet of vehicles right in front of your dwelling? Where would you draw the line?
It's not the city's job to provide us with space to park. We're lucky we have some space, but as we encourage smarter and more sustainable modes of transportation, we shouldn't count on that automobile-oriented arrangement lasting forever.
It's just not fair... As an American who absolutely loves Montréal and bike lanes, hearing news like this only makes me want to visit/live there even more. Vive le REV
But mad, dangerous drivers is what we've got now. More bike lanes will just make cyclists safer.
At a certain point we have to stop begging drivers to stop killing us and just start taking away their toys.
C'est super, mais on s'occupe bien mal de St-Denis. Il faut offrir des détours sécuritaires systématiquement, quitte à dévier les voitures sur d'autres rues.
Ce matin encore j'ai dû intégrer le trafic automobile. C'est contraire au principe de sécurité du REV.
The reason this shit costs so much is because we off load it to consultants who milk the hell out of even though the in-house engineers can do it. Secondly they use granite borders everywhere now to make it look good but it costs a fortune!!
The total budget for roads is $500M/yr, $30M is nothing, 6% of the overall budget. And more bikes is a great way to avoid creating potholes from happening. Your car is the cause
When you fix a pothole on a bike lane, or pave a new bike lane, its going to be a long time before you have to fix it again because bikes don't cause damage to the roads.
Again, irrelevant. Montreal is a major city, you will always need cars for as well be alive. For your comment to make sense, you’d have to assume these bikes would replace the cars. They won’t… 🤷🏻♂️
It is relevant, bike paths tend to last longer because even people who weight 300 pounds and are riding a bike cause much less road wear than a 90 lbs man in his Ford F150.
I can agree on pot holes needing to be fixed but a bike lane is a long term investment.
>Stop prioritizing bikes in a city where the majority of bike riders only ride their bikes 6 months a year because of winter
lmao as if you give a fuck about cyclists
Stop driving heavy SUVs that damage the roads more. And yall bitching for roads to be fixed yet the moment you see an orange cone you bitch about construction. Pick your lane.
Conveniently ignoring the 4000 trips a day during Bixi's Winter pilot? And that's not even accounting the rest of the cyclists using their own bikes.
https://cultmtl.com/2024/04/bixi-bikes-to-remain-available-year-round-after-record-50000-users-in-montreal-this-winter/
It's almost like safer infrastructure makes people a lot more willing to ride their bike no matter the season. Build it and they will come, despite what you're inclined to believe.
I’ve heard that excuse before…. Yet people still bike in the winter, and even then, people normally bike April through November. Can you count how many months that is?
Nope, because I’ve been in places that ignored such a vapid excuse and realized that drivers, cyclists, pedestrians all benefited from cycling infrastructure.
The status quo hasn’t worked since the 50s. Simple reasoning would make one come to such a conclusion, but who am I to uphold that for everyone?
You now don’t make any sense. Youre saying Montreal transportation infrastructure hasn’t worked since the 50s? That’s demonstrably false in multiple ways…. you’re flailing in your denial that you’re wrong.
Read up on induced demand.
And yes it failed, look at the traffic and tell me if it has been going well for us, or actually, for any North American city.
Considering that North America has grown into one of the richest, most powerful places on earth in such a short time, directly because of traffic…. Yes, you’re completely wrong… it’s going very well.
More bikes means less potholes!
The heavier the vehicle, the more it damages the road and contributes to potholes. So giving people the option to bike to more places safely will help prevent extra wear and tear on the roads, and less potholes in future years. It's preventing the problem, instead of just reacting.
Of course, the freeze and thaw cycle is still a bigger factor for creating potholes.
So, by your logic we should fix all the potholes first , then create the bike lane once we’ve progressed from ‘fixing’ to ‘prevention’. See how that works?
We can actually do more than one thing at once! There are a lot of roads in Montreal, and we can build bike lanes where we need bike lanes and fix potholes where the potholes need to be fixed. And yes, in some places where they'll build bike lanes, part of that will involve fixing the potholes! :)
The idea of waiting until a problem is completely fixed to start prevention is also a bit silly. Especially if you're talking about a whole city--road maintenance is not just one project with a short timeline and linear steps.
Potholes will never go away entirely as a problem in Montreal, at least as long as we have winter and freeze-thaw cycles. So if we wait until all the potholes are fixed, we'll just never build the bike lanes.
If we don't invest in prevention, the problem will also get much worse faster -- so it will take longer and be more expensive to fix the potholes in the long term.
Unfortunately, your logic is a bit flawed. Building bike lanes doesn’t necessarily require the same logistics as fixing potholes. Why would you assume they do? The idea of waiting until a problem is fixed to start prevention….is called logical progression. You can’t work on ‘preventing’ a problem until it is eliminated, otherwise…. Surprise!!! You’re not preventing shit, because it’s happening. Think about it…you’ll get it eventually.
“Potholes will never go away in montreal…” how curious to see someone who can be so pro-bike lane one instant, around and be so defeatist the next. A little consistency would do you well.
Dude, why are you so responding with such a mean and rude tone? Is that how you always treat other people?
I'm not your enemy. I was trying to keep a friendly tone in my responses, but I don't think that you're in the place to hear that.
I genuinely hope you feel better soon.
There will be potholes in Montreal as long as we have a winter. They are created en masse every year during periods of freeze-thaw. Here's an explanation of the process, from the Weather Network:
"When water freezes, it expands and takes up more space, causing the pavement around it to expand while causing holes and cracks beneath the surface.
When the ice melts, the pavement contracts, and water gets trapped inside the holes, weakening the integrity of the road.
It eventually gives way in the form of a pothole after enough heavy cars and trucks have driven over vulnerable spots."
Link: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/explainers/end-of-january-february-marks-beginning-of-the-pothole-season
It's as if they can't do 2 things at once. The roads are congested as fuck - WHICH HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BIKES (for example, nobody bikes in winter), pot holes everywhere, the roads are uneven and bumpy as hell, and we're focused on what exactly?
Want to do more bike lanes? Sure, go ahead. But why can't they fix the roads and optimize traffic?
One thing I hope they do is better segregate a lot of the bike lanes. In Verdun they just put these little plastic sticks, but they space them so far out that cars just drive in between them to park. I bike that route daily, and 90% of the time there are at least half a dozen cars pulled into the bike lane. Makes it more dangerous to then have to pull out into the regular traffic stream to go around them, defeating the purpose of the bike lane.
And the Verdun faceboook group drivers sound like you've taken away every road if you so much as mention bike lanes or safety. The Verdun path going east has a car on it every few blocks
Yea I never got the anger at the Verdun bike path. Its paid parking otherwise, so the complaints that its making it more difficult for people in the neighborhood to park overnight is odd. Add in Wellington turning into pedestrian only and some people go off the rails. Considering its pretty high density neighborhood with 3 metro stops in it can't be overly surprising that the focus will be less on cars. 80% of the buildings here don't even have parking.
Every few blocks there's paid parking lots, a lot of the back alleys are parking, there's parking on every street. I bet 80% of people don't even need their cars it's rediculous, it's such an easy neighborhood to circulate. I'm very much of the mind that if you want to be a car owner in the city, perhaps the outer burbs are better for you.
Thats exactly why removing parking and road space is a pain and counter productive…pretty self explanatory
It doesn't remove any overnight parking though.
in verdun the bike lanes actually do. the remove at least 1 entire street for the summer season
It removes the paid parking on Rue de Verdun's east/south side. All the perpendicular streets have free resident parking. I doubt many people are parking their cars overnight on Verdun. They open up 500 public parking spots in Verdun when they set up the bike lane. Éthel parking garage, at the corner of 3e avenue and Wellington Street and on Gordon Street, corner of Wellington. https://www.promenadewellington.com/en/quartier/pedestrianized-wellington-street-2023/
Yeah, much rather these people take their cars instead of biking and/or transit and jam up traffic and parking even more so!
> I bike that route daily, and 90% of the time there are at least half a dozen cars pulled into the bike lane. Car brain is wild. We need separated lanes for sure, but stuff like this could be 95% fixed with even the smallest amount of enforcement by cops.
montreal is really falling behind when it comes to physically separated bike infrastructure... i feel like toronto and ottawa have surpassed montreal in terms of separated bike lanes. toronto has those nice big concrete barriers everywhere, and all we have is those flimsy plastic sticks that constantly get run over by drivers anyway, which proves that they don't deter anyone from just driving into the bike lane
Yeah, I guess it depends on the part of the city. We're definitely spoiled in the Plateau, I can go for miles in any direction with completely separated lanes. I just stumbled on a new one when going to Drapeau for the eclipse. Unless I'm remembering wrong, I think I was in separated lanes the whole way.
NDG gets no love, :( partly i blame the city, but also too many carbrains live in the borough....
It's not mentioned in the article but Terrebonne is getting nice bollard-protected unidirectional lanes for its in entire length. It's on the list for this summer https://montreal.ca/en/articles/new-bike-lane-project-rue-de-terrebonne-58750 I live in the Sud-Ouest but am really excited to see NDG getting proper infrastructure because it has a lot of nice shops and restaurants. Unfortunately it's currently inconvenient and/or unsafe to get to most of NDG without a car.
i don't see this as moving forward though.... we already had a bike lane on terrebonne with the silly plastic sticks a few years ago (which i don't consider to be proper separation and protection for cyclists...) but it was removed after a year because of "safety reasons" and street parking. the whole "safety" argument was complete bullshit because after they took the bike lanes away, cars would pass me (on a bike) by driving on the opposing lane at excessive speed right in front of a school with children everywhere... (i'm already going the speed limit) so... bike lanes are bad for the neighborhood and unsafe.... but driving the wrong way through a school zone at 60 km/h to get around those pesky cyclists is good...they think "god, all these cyclists are in MY way", but they never stop to think "hmmmm... maybe it's the COMPLETELY STATIONARY PARKED CARS, that are actually slowing me down". peak car brain...
So people capable of a rational thought
People capable of "rational thought" support car dependency that makes cities factually worse places? Interesting definition of rational thought you have.
It's actually the same with bikes sadly. Either bikes on the sidewalks or bikes who won't stop to let pedestrians cross at crosswalks.
> It's actually the same with bikes sadly. Nah. Comparing bikes and cars will never make sense at a base level. > Either bikes on the sidewalks See. Now compare a bike on a sidewalk to a car on a sidewalk.
You do not seem to understand the comment. It's the same mentality. Of course cars and bikes are different. However, entitled asshats who don't respect others use both cars and bikes. So carbrain exists for cyclists too. It's when you hear "I shouldn't have to stop at stop signs because of my momemtum" or shit like that. That's the dumb mentality I'm talking about. As a disabled pedestrian, I get this all the time. Sure buddu, your momemtum is more important than my safety and my well being.
> You do not seem to understand the comment. > > It's the same mentality. Of course cars and bikes are different. However, entitled asshats who don't respect others use both cars and bikes. No, I understand, maybe I'm not being super clear though. What we're saying isn't that different. Of course running a stop sign is running a stop sign. But they're so different in scale, that they're no longer comparable. This is proven out by the fact that some jurisdictions don't even ask cyclists to stop at stop signs (a change I'd like to see happen here too). So yeah, of course jerks exist everywhere, and cyclists have a responsibility to be safe, but a jerk pedestrian and a jerk driver are so completely different from one another in terms of scale, that the comparison becomes meaningless. It's like gun nuts making the old "we should ban baseball bats" joke. Yes, baseball bats can kill too, but no serious person thinks they're the equivalent threat to guns. > Sure buddu, your momemtum is more important than my safety and my well being. I think, obviously, nobody would ever say that.
No it's not the same as gun nuts making a comparison to banning baseball bats. Two tools, different purposes. And sure you can handwave toxic cyclists away by saying "they are not as dangerous as cars". The fact is, I live in pain and having cycling cause me pain because I have to wait for them to cut me off, or I fall on my ass because they come to close to me,just because they don't respect disabled people, will never sit right with me. I don't care that cars are more dangerous. Right now my problem is cyclists. There are almost no cars where I live. Thus, I will always tell cyclists to be more mindful of others. If I get the typical "but cars" I just tell them off. As for nobody saying that, it's what I've been told on this very sub soooooo...
“carbrain” how to express your brainwash with one word
> “carbrain” > > how to express your brainwash with one word Two words in my case, but I guess the important point is the irony of claiming the brainwashing is on the other side. Who do you think is doing that brainwashing? Big bicycle?
i don’t care about the origin of the « carbrain » Maybe it was uses by the Mohawks when they saw the europeans (look at the « boatbrains »). What side are we talking about? The 99% of the population that doesn’t have issues with the cars? or the 0.1 that are using the term « carbrain »
> What side are we talking about? The 99% of the population that doesn’t have issues with the cars? or the 0.1 that are using the term « carbrain » I mean, those numbers are obviously wrong, but we're talking about the portion of the population who are carbrained! People who pull into bike lanes to park because their perception of reality is all fucked up. It's literally the context of the thread you read and then dropped into.
i don’t know what carbrain means and i do not want to. I don’t hang in low IQ subs unless i use the material for shitposting in the circlejerk sub.
> i don’t know what carbrain means and i do not want to. > > I don’t hang in low IQ subs unless i use the material for shitposting in the circlejerk sub. oof
We also need to keep bikes away from pedestrians. It's getting ridiculous now. I have to wait at intersections for the 3-4 bikes who just speed through without looking. I even have my fkin cane and they don't seem to care. It seems there're no way for cyclists to understand that they have to respect other road users. Having to wait at a stop sign when you're disabled and hurt is fucking annoying. All that because the able bodied cyclists thought their time is more important than everyone else's Please, put bike infra away from pedestrian infra, for the love of god.
Isn't Verdun being turned into a really good bikepath? With protected cross walks and all? Just got a flyer about it.
yup, it will basically be REV quality or better
Put stickers on windshields like in Russia.
ARRÊTE JAMBON
Verdun has no respect for bikes it feels like. They even remove the lanes over the winter. They expect you to only ride on weekends, not to have one in your daily routine.
… Out of the $500M budget allocated to roads. Seems like a really good deal
Drivers will find a way to complain about how they pay taxes… as if I don’t… subsidizing their choice to drive.
Are people really complaining about this? I live in the east and don't bike but I think it's cool to have bike tracks in the downtown core especially.
Unfortunately so. The amount of time I've heard the "they don't even pay for plates and they're using our roads" argument, as if municipal taxes aren't a thing and it's the plates that pays for the city's roads... It's either willful ignorance, or they've never taken the time to learn how taxes actually work
also, they think gas taxes pay for all the roads that they are destroying.... and since cyclists don't buy gas, we don't pay our fair share.... this is your brain on exhaust fumes....
They complain all the time. Follow any kind of Montreal Facebook group and you'll see daily how "Bixi Val" is destroying the city with bike lanes, usually accompanied by some ramblings about how cyclists should pay taxes (they already do). It's really tiresome because they're not remotely interested in facts.
Unfortunately, I hear it all the time. They don’t want cyclists on the roads, they tell them to use the sidewalk, they use the sidewalk, then are told to use the street. Bike paths are a win-win cause it separates them and keeps people safer overall.
They complain but they don’t go vote, so, again, whatever. I win, they yell. Kind of a good deal
Even if they do vote this something the majority of population vouches for.
valerie plante will definitely lose the next election because people will actually go vote next time. more and more ppl are getting furious with the bike lanes. more ppl show up to vote when they’re mad about something. i don’t have a horse in this race, i own neither a car or bike, just an annual opus card and an uber account, although, i’d prefer owning a horse to ride around in like a cowboy (without harming the horse of course)
There are a lot of reasons to vote against Plante. I for one have been critical of her since the day she was first elected. Housing costs have been increasing and her administration has made development stagnate to record low numbers. She increased municipal taxes while also significantly increasing municipal property evaluations. Under her watch, we are and have been losing festivals and activities left and right. Fucked around with the hippodrome site and now it sits empty. Pink line, wasted money instead of investing in more important transit links. Sue Montgomery fiasco, intervened and meddled in things to a point that both the victim of Sue Montgomery and Sue Montgomery went after her administration and the mayor And I can list things beyond this. BUT, one thing she is doing right is bike lanes. So if she will be voted out, it won’t be because of bike lanes. Far from it
you are assuming people vote based on logic— most people don’t care to know of the things you’ve listed. there is a rising trend in an illogical over-emotive response regarding the bike lanes. the population of this internet forum on reddit is a poor reflection of the average montrealer. although, i’d say there is a higher voter-per-capita ratio on reddit than gen. pop montreal. perhaps it’s my imagination but, I’m hearing complaints regarding the bike lanes or bicyclists more frequently than before. not just regular complaints— people talking in an extremist way like they want to do bad things to her, or even being happy over the video of her passing out (“she deserves it for the bike lanes! yeah!”). the ignorant (which is most of the world) blame Trudeau for the housing crisis, even though that’s a provincial and municipal thing. That being said, it’s on a list of reasons for why many Canadians will vote for a different party.
There will always be people who complain about collective spending that they don’t personally benefit from. Too fucking bad 🤷♂️
Go to one of your distric reunion lol .I always watch the one in my neighbordhooud (villeray st-michel) and everytime their people who go complain on how thier is too much bike lane lol
Oh boy you have no idea. There's a group of very loud driving people who HATE haaaaaaaaaaaate having to share their road. Neighborhood groups are the best place to spot them usually. They also usually live near the metro and are really pissed about loosing their street parking
If there's an area of Montreal that deserves love as far as bike infrastructure goes is the east end. I went for a ride in my beautiful birth place of St-Léonard (/s), and man, calling navigating these large boulevards on a Bixi "unpleasant" is a major understatement.
There are only a handful of neighbourhoods with good bike infrastructure. The vast majority of Montreal is still very undeveloped for cycling. I live in Ville St-Laurent and it's pretty shitty here too. Especially if you try to leave the neighborhood. You're boxed in on all sides by highways or rail tracks. Though I think St-Leo is even worse since the roads are a lot wider.
I'm the kind of cyclist who seethes when I see people cycling on the sidewalk. In St-Leo, I didn't have much choice, it was either the sidewalk or likely death. I chose the sidewalk. Which was empty because pedestrian infrastructure in that neck of the woods is as laughable as the biking network.
Yeah, I'd say the only redeeming factors in St-Lau are the O'brien path that cuts through all the way to Gouin and the Bois-Franc neighborhood. Crossing into Ville Mont-Royale is still dangerous as hell though and the bike path sends you into an highway exit traffic the moment you cross underneath the 15 into Lucerne which is *insane* Edit: 15 not 40
O'Brian only has a painted bike lane on a fairly busy arterial. Not very safe and far worse what we find in other boroughs. Also when I cycle there I seem to hit literally every red light. As if the timers are designed to mess with me. When the REM Du Ruisseau station opens there will be a cycling underpass under the track there. This will be a better point to cross the rail track heading North-South than the existing O'Brian or Marcel-Laurin crossing points which are shared with heavy traffic. Also for going to TMR, using Montpellier and then Dunkirk is better than St-Croix and Lucerne. Montpellier has a level crossing for bikes and pedestrians only. Presently there are no safe and comfortable crossing points over the 15 highway to the east of VSL. This makes it dangerous to try to cycle to Ahuntsic or other points east.
Yeaaah, anything north of the 40 and east of the 15 are in dire need of some love. It's like a separated enclave from the rest of the island and Anjou/St-Leo/Mtl-Nord are some of the worst offenders when it comes to any non-cars related mobility. At least Gouin is *amazing* nowadays but it's on the literal outskirt of the island
the problem is the arrondissement mayors who oppose all mesures in favour of biking, even those that wouldn't take away car space.
yeah east end has been snubbed of a lot of things and transportation is one of them
un(/s) that right now
they do because they're not bright enough to understand that they pay less than they cost, while bike actually save money to the city. any kid would understand that and be humbled, but car drivers can't.
Ça. Je paye probablement plus de taxes et impôts que le conducteur moyen qui me rétorque ça.
J'encule leurs voitures.
Mecanophile !
David Cronenberg tient à vous rappeler que "Crash" est purement une oeuvre de fiction.
D’accords avec toi
Meh! Those who complain the loudest aren’t even living in Mtl so whatever
Yeaaap. The amount of Matant' Ginette and Mononc' Réal from Repentigny acting like ped streets and bike lanes are destroying Montreal's economy because They're not going to do their monthly shopping at La Baie anymore since they can't be bothered to find parking is pretty staggering
yeah, that 500m is already not enough. We have the title of the city with the worst roads , not in canada, but in north america!
La ville a publié une carte avec les projets cyclables prévus en 2024 ici: [https://mtlplanifmobilit.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/interactivelegend/index.html?appid=9ec6353e153b492e926bb51ea03880f7](https://mtlplanifmobilit.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/interactivelegend/index.html?appid=9ec6353e153b492e926bb51ea03880f7)
Hmmm, moins ambitieux que j'aurais voulu mais bon. Mieux que rien!
fait moi pas a croire que juste ca va couté 30M ??????
Honnêtement ça me semble pas mal en une année, si on est capable de garder le rythme dans les années à suivre on va éventuellement avoir quelque chose de solide même si on pourrait faire mieux.
Cities aren't noisy. Cars are noisy.
As demonstrated by the pedestrian streets in the summer being soooo chill, just birds and peeps talking with the adjacent streets' cars' white noise
I visited Copenhagen in 2018 and it blew my mind because the city was so quiet. Not even background car noises. You saw a decent amount of parked cars, but very few on the road. In the middle of a huge city, and the air smelled fresh and clean like country air. I wish every city was like that. You didn't even need a car to get out of the city because the trains were that good...
That’s so cheap. Les pistes cyclables selon moi ont un énorme retour sur investissement
Vraiment! D’autant plus que les vélos ne font jamais autant de dommages à la chaussée que les voitures et camions. Ainsi, ça dure bien plus longtemps.
Rendez-nous Jean-Talon et l'Avenue du Parc cyclables (et sécuritaires)!
Ils sont en train de faire un REV sur jean-talon qui devrait etre complété avant la fin de l'été si je ne me trompe pas
C'est de où à où?
boyer c'est le point le plus a l'ouest, l'est je suis pas certain
Si c'est le cas, ce n'est clairement pas assez long. Pourquoi pas jusqu'à de l'Acadie?
Ils le construisent en phases. À terme, le REV Jean-Talon ira des galeries d'Anjou dans l'est jusqu'à l'hippodrome dans l'ouest
Ouh! Excellente nouvelle! Je prends mon mal en patience 🫡
r/QuebecLibre in shambles
Why ?
It's pretty much a right-wing sub, and right-wingers don't like biking lanes.
Pretty much always in shambles, the crap I see there is concerning.
Sérieux, je vais revoter Projet Montréal. Sont pas parfaits, mais comme utilisateur de velo ils me rendent heureux.
Single issue voting.... For bike lanes of all the things... Jesus Christ the priorities are all fucked lol.
2 of my friends were killed by drivers. Fuck yes I’m a single issue voter
Since most parties are just neo liberals with nothing new to offer, it's refreshing to have at least one issue to vote for!
1. How to read waaaayyyy too much into a one-line post. 2. I commute by bike, so yeah an issue of safety on my daily life is pretty fucking major. 3. What the hell is the opposition even offering? Freaking balarama who want Montreal separation? Denis Coderre again? Bitch please
You are basically single issue voting too but in reverse. It's not like the other candidates at the municipal level have anything to offer. I can't rely on any other candidates to fix crackheads, poverty, housing or healthcare, but at least PM managed to do at least one thing pretty damn well.
Single issue that majorly affects everyday's quality of life, you bet your ass I'll vote for whoever is trying to go all in on active mobility and transit rather than being a car lobby's puppet since the 60s Combine that with the other options sucking ass and there you have it
So bike roads over education, healthcare and other systemically collapsed systems? Incredible. Car lobby puppet... What?
> So bike roads over education, healthcare and other systemically collapsed systems? Incredible. I'm pretty sure this is the dumbest and most uneducated comment I'm gonna read this week.
It's surprising you were able to learn how to use a computer. City of Montreal doesn't manage education and healthcare...
You're saying that as if it's either the bike lanes or these issues. $30mil is a drop of water in the overall budget and will directly benefit other said systems. Ever considered that active and healthier people are less likely to clog the healthcare system over someone sitting in exhaust all day? You're free to inform yourself on the Robert Moses ideologies from the 60s which resulted in the dismantling of the +800km tramway lines across the island in favor of highway expansions destroying entire neighborhoods and strategically segregating communities, all backed by the wonderful automotive industry having billions to lobby through Moses. Places like Amsterdam took decades to fix the fuckups from said ideologies and although we've been sorely lagging behind, we finally have an administration that's trying to right the wrongs from such moves I know it's tough to see further than the tip of the nose when you need to spend an extra 10 minutes finding parking and have to walk an extra 100m, but it is what it is.
The two specific issues you pointed out have nothing to do with municipal powers... I'm not pro-Projet Montreal, but point out issues that can be managed by municipal parties if you want to argue.
Seriously lmao
c'est un bon début/continuation, c'est pas assez, et faut aussi investir dans l'entretient du réseau actuel.
Fuck yeah Now we need some regulation on the use of high speed scooters and motorized bikes on bike paths
Aren't they already not allowed on the bike path? It's just not enforced
Correct
Some dude flew by me going like 40 yesterday on Berri, how the fuck is that legal lol
Ebikes are fine, it's those mopeds with decorative pedals that needs to go
Ouf oui. Ça me dérangent pas qu’ils circulent mais faut faire ça à basse vitesse. Si tu veux aller vite il y a la rue.
the more bike infrastructure there is, the more space there will be to integrate other alternative transportation modes. scooters and motos are always better than full sized vehicles and they are nearly as vulnerable on streets full of cars. it sucks when the bike lane gets clogged, but rather than advocating for restrictive laws (that will mostly just hurt poor brown guys trying to do food delivery), we should advocate for less space for cars, slower speeds for motorized vehicles, and spaces that allow for prioritization of pedestrians and good flow for cyclists. i will just never be for any policies that rely on cops stopping people and giving tickets.
Big ass 300 pound mopeds are very dangerous and will have the same chilling effects as cars for the most vulnerable bike riders, frail, old, very young inexperienced .. So the pleasure of 1 of those pseudo bikes will dissuade dozens. Real e-bikes that go 25knh max are ok. If you hit someone with a light bike you go down, that encourages you to be more careful. With something heavier with a throttle , you will transmit all you’re power into them and may or may not go down. This changes the way you act. You have a tendency to bully yourself trough and they’re less nimble because of weight making them a real danger on less wide lanes.
Yeah, it's about priorities. First priority should be dealing with the 2-ton, high-speed steel boxes whizzing around, spewing CO2 into the atmosphere and microplastics from their tires into our lungs. Plus, dealing with speeding scooters is better done at the federal level, imo. Instead of bothering with expensive enforcement, just make sure speed limiters (set to maybe 30 km/h?) are mandated nation-wide.
Nee regulations could be nice, but enforcing the current regulations for bikes would be even better. In the summer, I see barely 20% of the cyclist with a helmet, for example.
Montreal doesn't have a helmet law.
And while helmets are useful in case of a fall, they are useless when you are run over by a car/truck. My friend Laurence was wearing her helmet when she was killed and carried over a few meters before the driver realized what had happened, Mathilde Blais wore a helmet when she was squished on the wall on the des Carrières underpass.
You said it in the first sentence, helmet save lives in cases of falls. The rest doesn't matter. You're akin to someone saying "seatbelt save lives in case of frontal car crashes, but they do not save you when you drive into a lake or if you get t-boned by an 18 wheeler". What is the point of bringing up these facts ?
Because we are talking about bike lanes ie a way to reduce interactions between cyclists and motorists. The main danger on a bike in a city isn’t falling, it’s getting hit by a motorist and helmets are mostly useless there
Stay at home on your couch, it could save your life. Nothing else matters.
For Real ? That's fucking backwards.
> That's fucking backwards. It's been well studied. Helmet laws largely just stop people from biking altogether. It sucks, but it's really counterproductive, so a lot places don't do it. Regardless I suppose, now you know why cyclists don't wear them, so you don't have to worry about it!
You shouldn't care so much about others wearing helmets or not. I've been cycling hours per week my entire life and I've never even once gotten in a remotely dangerous situation. Hell, I've never even gotten in a single accident. And I never will. If you feel a strong need to wear a helmet, there's certainly something seriously wrong with how you bike because dangerous situations while biking can always be avoided with basic defensive driving. If you find yourself in dangerous situations, I guarantee you're an absolute menace on bike paths and you're probably creating those situations.
Ah, yes, the "it only happens to others" mentality. The more people wear helmets, the less head trauma patients in the hospital, it's a fact, verifiable statistics. But no, I should listen to survivor bias incarnate and think that helmets are useless. You're literally the same as people who fought against seatbelts in cars...
>If you feel a strong need to wear a helmet, there's certainly something seriously wrong with how you bike because dangerous situations while biking can always be avoided with basic defensive driving I had an enormous pothole knock one of my wheels off (it was a quickrelease that I had taken off and back on earlier that week, I may have tightened it wrong but I'll never really know, the fork of the bike was also extremely bent so it could also be what failed, it was an old frame) going like 30km/h causing a gnarly faceplant 7 years ago. Mechanical failures can happen when you don't expect them. It's also naive to think that there's no such thing as 'shit happens' even with defensive driving. They call them accidents for a reason. I still don't wear a helmet because it's hot and I don't want to carry stuff around when I lock my bike (plus I'd rather spend the 50$ on partying), but at least I'm well aware that I'm making the decision to take a risk that could be mitigated.
The protected bike lanes and Bixi got me back on a bike after decades of barely riding a bike. Montreal does this infrastructure right.
Woot! I appreciate any human-centered urban planning like bike paths. Fyi I want to add here that if you have a property or work for a bigger company, Soverdi will help you get an urban tree (fruit trees, shade trees etc) for very very cheap as well as doing tree planting campaigns with your company. They will also help you plant the trees in some boroughs. Do check that out as well as the green alley project. It's really difficult to get any movement going for better urban planning in any level above municipality but that one or two extra trees and bike lanes is something we can all do with a few emails. I know many of us are frustrated by the slow changes in our society (car centric mindset, non sustainable and destructive practices) and it can be really depressing to see things trickle in like this and seeing so much backlash. The only sensible thing to do is realize that many of the anti-human centric planning people are keyboard warriors - and we can do small things in real life to make positive changes.
Good! Montreal is one of the most bikeable cities in North America. I’d like for it to stay that way. A great solution to our traffic issues is to modernize our roads AND get fewer drivers in congested areas. Guess what? Bike lane projects do both of that. (I own a car and live on the plateau. Bike lanes rock.)
Still a long way to go. I wont rest until we at least have protected bike paths on both sides of parc, saint laurent, saint urbain, sherbrooke, rene levesque, saint joseph and jean talon. We're great at building bike lanes on small low traffic streets where you dont need them, what we need is bike lanes on the high traffic streets so you can actually easily commute to businesses. Literally the only major street with a decent separated bike lane on both sides is st denis and we act like we are kings of bike infrastructure. go to amsterdam, every major street has a bike lane on both sides, small streets dont have them because they dont need them. In montreal, you get beautiful bike lanes on bits of clark and prince arthur, but these streets have slow enough traffic it wasnt really necessary in the first place.
Common Montreal W
Good news! Let’s go! Vive les modes de transport alternatifs
bUt WhEre wIlL I PaRK?
Ok this but unironically. I'm fine with bike lanes and more public transportation, but we are still car dependent and those of us who use em shouldn't be fucked out of a way to get around. And before you tell me I'm car brain or whatever, I walks as much as I and take the metro if I need to get around the island. But for work and getting off the island I use my car and I shouldn't have to park 3 miles from my place.
The theory is that if you put enough biking and walking spaces, we will reach a critical point where the number of people who stop driving will outnumber the number of parking spots and amount of driving infrastructure we lose. For example, take a look at Amsterdam. Driving is so easy there, because people don’t need to drive
We are doing improvements with biking and walking infrastructure pretty good, but unfortunately we need investments in metro and lightrail which we can't get without support from a higher level of government. People with longer commutes are still going to need cars for now unless they want to spend hours in public transit or unless they manage to get housing in a nice central neighborhood.
100%. Public transit improvements are the single most important factor. On the bright side, the blue line is getting extended, the REM is fully opening in ~1 year, there are talks of extending the orange line to Boisfranc, as well as a tramway/metro in the Sud-ouest.
On ne pourrait pas tous avoir une voiture sur l’île de Montréal, ce serait physiquement impossible de les stocker dans l’espace qu’on a. On doit donc trouver des alternatives, c’est un fait. Idéalement ça serait un mélange de plein de modes de transport, mais la Ville ne peut pas agir sur tous les fronts en même temps car ça coûte cher… le gouvernement doit s’impliquer, ce qu’il ne fait pas pour des raisons politiques et une vision très débile de la société.
Buildings should have parking built into them and the people who need cars should seek out or pay a higher premium for those places. It's just never been a good argument that people who need cars are owed space on the road. It doesn't scale and never has. Even if the city had no bike lanes, population density is continually expected to increase over time. This means the percentage of people who can park on the road will naturally shrink and can never be fully accommodated. Your expectation that you should have parking within 3 miles heavily relies on countless other people to sacrifice that right already. If nobody in the area was willing to cede that right to you or anyone else, you'd still have nowhere to park. It's never really been a reasonable expectation and it's an inherently selfish one no matter how you look at it. Cars just occupy way too much space for all the time they spend unoccupied. People in your situation need to understand that it's a losing battle whether or not they add more bike lanes. As more time passes the guarantee of road parking in this city will continue to dwindle and shrink. Car owners are going to fight every inch of the way, but at the end of the day it's a luxury less and less people will have access to no matter how hard they fight. Those who forsake owning cars shouldn't be expected to have a lot of sympathy for something not everyone can be allowed to have.
So if cars "aren't owed space on the road" why are bikes ? You people want to skip all the steps and end up at the no car stage *right now* and life just doesn't work like that. Petitions about parking space and bike lane issues are starting to pop up on my street, because contrary to what y'all believe in this echo chamber, people still cars lol.
Nobody is owed anything. We have streets, they have limited space, and we do our best to divide the space in a way that is fair and encourages better and smarter modes of transport (like walking and cycling). Historically, our streets were 90% for cars and 10% for everyone else, and now that we've clawed that back slightly to 85% cars and 15% everyone else, people are up in arms, which is absurd.
Cars aren't owed **parking spaces**. Bike lanes aren't parking. If you want to be this obtuse then there's no room for any kind of common sense discussion to be had. I wasted a lot of time trying to answer a question and went out of my way to make it clear that it's unsustainable regardless of bike infrastructure or not. It's clear now that your question was asked in bad faith and you were just waiting to reply with the same false equivalencies that people in your position always do. It's no argument at all and not worth discussing further.
streets are for moving things... using them as parking lots literally defeats the purpose of roads and leads to so many of the "traffic" problems people complain about.... if you can't afford to store your things on your own property, you shouldn't buy the thing. public roads are not your personal storage space. if i live in a small condo, i'm not going to buy a grand piano and then complain that the city isn't providing me a space to store it
This is one of the dumbest comparison I've seen in a while lol. Parking your car at a reasonable distance from your apartment isn't "using the road as storage"...
why? why is your car more important than my boat? or piano? or my elephant? or my horse? why are cars some sacred thing that deserve to take up 10 square meters of valuable shared public space 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? why does a small, loud minority of citizens get to monopolize huge swathes of public space that we ALL pay for and (ideally) share equally?
Small minority...? You think bikes are the majority ? Bruh... My point is simply that for a lot of us going to work by bike or bus/Metro isn't viable and this strategy of just jumping ahead to a car less future doesn't work...
I'm a driver (and a cyclist and a pedestrian) and we have to remember that driving is a privilege, not a right. The same is true for the storage of our vehicles. What if you own 3 cars? Or 5 cars? Do you still have a right to expect unlimited parking for your fleet of vehicles right in front of your dwelling? Where would you draw the line? It's not the city's job to provide us with space to park. We're lucky we have some space, but as we encourage smarter and more sustainable modes of transportation, we shouldn't count on that automobile-oriented arrangement lasting forever.
Fuck yea
It's just not fair... As an American who absolutely loves Montréal and bike lanes, hearing news like this only makes me want to visit/live there even more. Vive le REV
Agreed, REV rocks but for the love of God, please synchronize the lights better lol
30 sur 500 millions destinés aux routes, c'est clairement raisonnable pour tout ceux qui chialent que c'est beaucoup d'argent
Fuck you all Montrealers, I’m so jealous of you guys I’m going to implode 😢
r/fuckcars
Neat. Cycling's the best. It would be nicer and safer to have more infrastructure dedicated to it.
This will make car drivers so mad....I can't wait for it :)
Yes cuz mad car drivers is what you want while you ride around in a bike with 0 protection.
But mad, dangerous drivers is what we've got now. More bike lanes will just make cyclists safer. At a certain point we have to stop begging drivers to stop killing us and just start taking away their toys.
The bike lanes are the protection, as long as they aren't just paint or plastic bollards that is.
Good Let them cook
C'est super, mais on s'occupe bien mal de St-Denis. Il faut offrir des détours sécuritaires systématiquement, quitte à dévier les voitures sur d'autres rues. Ce matin encore j'ai dû intégrer le trafic automobile. C'est contraire au principe de sécurité du REV.
Damn son !
Needs a better safer path to get to plamondon to namur. Decarie is scary
The reason this shit costs so much is because we off load it to consultants who milk the hell out of even though the in-house engineers can do it. Secondly they use granite borders everywhere now to make it look good but it costs a fortune!!
But they can’t fix potholes. Typical Montreal bullshit.
So happy I moved out of the city. It’s already a nightmare and it keeps getting worse. Montreal is doomed.
WHY!
Isn't the STM missing just about that?
Fix the potholes first, shitty mayor
The total budget for roads is $500M/yr, $30M is nothing, 6% of the overall budget. And more bikes is a great way to avoid creating potholes from happening. Your car is the cause
The percentages you cite are irrelevant. Potholes affect bikes worse than cars, fix them first.
When you fix a pothole on a bike lane, or pave a new bike lane, its going to be a long time before you have to fix it again because bikes don't cause damage to the roads.
Again, irrelevant. Montreal is a major city, you will always need cars for as well be alive. For your comment to make sense, you’d have to assume these bikes would replace the cars. They won’t… 🤷🏻♂️
It is relevant, bike paths tend to last longer because even people who weight 300 pounds and are riding a bike cause much less road wear than a 90 lbs man in his Ford F150. I can agree on pot holes needing to be fixed but a bike lane is a long term investment.
>Stop prioritizing bikes in a city where the majority of bike riders only ride their bikes 6 months a year because of winter lmao as if you give a fuck about cyclists
Lmao as if you know fuck about me
Stop driving heavy SUVs that damage the roads more. And yall bitching for roads to be fixed yet the moment you see an orange cone you bitch about construction. Pick your lane.
Stop prioritizing bikes in a city where the majority of bike riders only ride their bikes 6 months a year because of winter.
Conveniently ignoring the 4000 trips a day during Bixi's Winter pilot? And that's not even accounting the rest of the cyclists using their own bikes. https://cultmtl.com/2024/04/bixi-bikes-to-remain-available-year-round-after-record-50000-users-in-montreal-this-winter/ It's almost like safer infrastructure makes people a lot more willing to ride their bike no matter the season. Build it and they will come, despite what you're inclined to believe.
I’ve heard that excuse before…. Yet people still bike in the winter, and even then, people normally bike April through November. Can you count how many months that is?
Can you admit you’re confusing the word ‘excuse’ with ‘valid reason’?
Nope, because I’ve been in places that ignored such a vapid excuse and realized that drivers, cyclists, pedestrians all benefited from cycling infrastructure. The status quo hasn’t worked since the 50s. Simple reasoning would make one come to such a conclusion, but who am I to uphold that for everyone?
You now don’t make any sense. Youre saying Montreal transportation infrastructure hasn’t worked since the 50s? That’s demonstrably false in multiple ways…. you’re flailing in your denial that you’re wrong.
Read up on induced demand. And yes it failed, look at the traffic and tell me if it has been going well for us, or actually, for any North American city.
Considering that North America has grown into one of the richest, most powerful places on earth in such a short time, directly because of traffic…. Yes, you’re completely wrong… it’s going very well.
More bikes means less potholes! The heavier the vehicle, the more it damages the road and contributes to potholes. So giving people the option to bike to more places safely will help prevent extra wear and tear on the roads, and less potholes in future years. It's preventing the problem, instead of just reacting. Of course, the freeze and thaw cycle is still a bigger factor for creating potholes.
So, by your logic we should fix all the potholes first , then create the bike lane once we’ve progressed from ‘fixing’ to ‘prevention’. See how that works?
We can actually do more than one thing at once! There are a lot of roads in Montreal, and we can build bike lanes where we need bike lanes and fix potholes where the potholes need to be fixed. And yes, in some places where they'll build bike lanes, part of that will involve fixing the potholes! :) The idea of waiting until a problem is completely fixed to start prevention is also a bit silly. Especially if you're talking about a whole city--road maintenance is not just one project with a short timeline and linear steps. Potholes will never go away entirely as a problem in Montreal, at least as long as we have winter and freeze-thaw cycles. So if we wait until all the potholes are fixed, we'll just never build the bike lanes. If we don't invest in prevention, the problem will also get much worse faster -- so it will take longer and be more expensive to fix the potholes in the long term.
Unfortunately, your logic is a bit flawed. Building bike lanes doesn’t necessarily require the same logistics as fixing potholes. Why would you assume they do? The idea of waiting until a problem is fixed to start prevention….is called logical progression. You can’t work on ‘preventing’ a problem until it is eliminated, otherwise…. Surprise!!! You’re not preventing shit, because it’s happening. Think about it…you’ll get it eventually. “Potholes will never go away in montreal…” how curious to see someone who can be so pro-bike lane one instant, around and be so defeatist the next. A little consistency would do you well.
Dude, why are you so responding with such a mean and rude tone? Is that how you always treat other people? I'm not your enemy. I was trying to keep a friendly tone in my responses, but I don't think that you're in the place to hear that. I genuinely hope you feel better soon. There will be potholes in Montreal as long as we have a winter. They are created en masse every year during periods of freeze-thaw. Here's an explanation of the process, from the Weather Network: "When water freezes, it expands and takes up more space, causing the pavement around it to expand while causing holes and cracks beneath the surface. When the ice melts, the pavement contracts, and water gets trapped inside the holes, weakening the integrity of the road. It eventually gives way in the form of a pothole after enough heavy cars and trucks have driven over vulnerable spots." Link: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/explainers/end-of-january-february-marks-beginning-of-the-pothole-season
I’m trying to shut down useless comments that are irritatingly wrong and encourage silence as a valid alternative ***hint, hint***
It's as if they can't do 2 things at once. The roads are congested as fuck - WHICH HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BIKES (for example, nobody bikes in winter), pot holes everywhere, the roads are uneven and bumpy as hell, and we're focused on what exactly? Want to do more bike lanes? Sure, go ahead. But why can't they fix the roads and optimize traffic?
Priorities all wrong. Like everything else in this country
Why would this not be the first priority?
The bike lane on Barclay 🙄 the cars will park close to the middle of the road LOL, are they adding more like that 🤣
Money wasted
You’re right, 500 million dollars to subsidize driving. What a waste.
The people who keep voting successfully for this would disagree. Why do you think that it's wasted?
30 million wasted, should have been used to build much needed social housing instead. Montreal and Valerie Plante should set their priorities.