Bravo Montreal. Ranked #1 bike friendly in North America and ranked #8 in the world. Also the only NA city to host a F1 Grand Prix race. Montreal is the most Euro sophisticated city in NA. Nobody will ever convince me otherwise. Montreal is absoutely my favorite CDN/NA city.
Hang your head in shame Toronto as your fat boy mayor is trying to reduce bicycle lanes in that city. LOL!!
Montreal has placed among the top 10 in a survey of the world’s most bike-friendly cities, earning the highest ranking of any metropolis in North America.
The Bicycle-Friendly Cities 2011 index, compiled by urban-planning Danish consulting firm Copenhagenize that specializes in cycling issues, noted that even the survey producers were surprised cities like Montreal, Rio de Janeiro and New York were among the top 20. The firm looked at 80 major cities around the world.
“Montreal is North America’s premiere bicycle city and comes in at No. 8.,” Copenhagenize writes. "The city has had a bicycle infrastructure since the mid-'80s, which should embarrass other cities on that continent, and the rebirth of bicycle culture is noticeable across the city.
“A strong, successful bike-sharing program has been implemented and a strong advocacy NGO (Vélo Québec), together with some visionary politicians, make the bicycle’s future in Montreal look rosy.”
Montreal has expanded its bicycle network in recent years, to a total of 535 kilometres, with the intention of increasing it to 800 kilometres by 2015. Bixi, the bicycle sharing network, has proven extremely popular.
Two way bike lanes on one side of the road, ending instantly by steering you onto sidewalks, where the other option is to face oncoming traffic turning right, head on into you, from the intersection.
Lousy lousy road surfaces, filth in lanes that can’t be reached by cleaners due to separators.
If that’s the future of bike friendly, I’ll settle for just “bike tolerant”, thanks.
I am not arguing with you directly sir, but methinks your article is just bike advocacy spin.
I find it sad that Montreal is the best in North America, when it could be so much more. Many of these “new, longer” bike lanes are dangerous. A teen skateboarder died this summer because of a poorly designed path running alongside a bus stop. Many bike paths run in an opposite direction to traffic, and encourage riders to continue riding against traffic where the bike path ends. The bike paths have gotten heavily congested due to the popularity of the bixi program, but no changes have been made. Bike rental shops have complained about the city taking away their customers and the city promised to help them, yet this summer I noticed the newest bixi bikes appearing at the rental stations closest to one of our biggest tourist areas: the Old Port. These are little LBS that mainly operate during the summer.
As much as I love this city and the convenience of Bixi, the public money (108million$ this year) going into the bike sharing program should have gone into public transportation and maintaining the road. The auditor-general of our city released a report this summer saying the city had no legal right to expand the program internationally. This summer has been an absolute nightmare with construction (driving and having to off-road through ripped up roads on the road bike just to get from A to B), and metro/subway station closures. Its bad enough we don’t have air conditioning on our buses or metro, the trains and buses are constantly delayed. Bixi is only available for 6-8 months a year, and service a small percentage of the population yet we find the need to service tourists more than the city’s people?
I’m with you. Bixi is far from a success. Besides the $$, the messed-up logisitcs, the installation of Bixi stations at the cost of prime parking spot which affected downtown merchants, I’m amazed that it hasn’t had the pants sued off it - any drunk tourist with a credit card can take a bike out, with no helmet requirements…
I have friends that take their chances on the road vs. riding in the bike lanes. There’s no etiquette communicated, the lanes are dirty and laden with shrapnel and filled with roller-bladers, brakeless fixies, old people and fat people in electric scooters and the like… Bike lanes intersect crosswalks, where pedestrians and cyclist alike have no respect for signals… it’s pretty bad.
In my 'hood, they’re putting in the requisite bike lanes. On my street - a large one - they’re painting the lines right now. The trouble is that the road is not wide enough, so there’s the car lane, then the bike lane, then the parking lane. The bike lane actually infringes on the parking lane by a few inches; it won’t be long until an opening door and cyclist meet, I fear.
