7/25/2023 0 Comments Sunny rest resort bike ride"There's some days when it's 8,000, which is impressive."īut hard data can be difficult to come by. The city began building the REV in 2020.Īround 2,000 cyclists a day, he said, use a recently constructed bike lane on St-Denis Street, a major artery in Montreal's urban core. "Montreal does have some great leadership in that respect," he said.īike counters - automated sensors that detect and count passing cyclists - indicate an increase in users on new routes that are part of the city's "express" bike lane network, the Réseau express vélo, Waygood said. Safer infrastructure, he said, will attract more women, older people and children. In North America, the majority of bike trips are taken by men who are experienced cyclists, said Owen Waygood, a professor of transportation engineering at Polytechnique Montréal. The protected lanes attract a wide range of users because the infrastructure increases cyclists' sense of safety. Montreal, he said, is a cycling leader in North America - particularly due to the city's focus on building a contiguous network of bike lanes that are protected from the rest of the street. "This created a whole generation of cyclists who today travel by bike, and once this critical mass exists, it will attract others," van Oosteren said. Many of those paths have become permanent. In Paris, meanwhile, that growth continued as the local government rapidly created temporary bike paths in 2020 to encourage people to enjoy the outdoors at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. In France, bicycles began to gain popularity in 2018, when a tax increase pushed the price of gas to nearly $3 a litre, he said. "The government, under pressure from both citizens who wanted livable cities and the real problem of gas shortages that we had in the Netherlands, decided to promote bikes," he said. That began to change due to a campaign for safer streets, launched in response to the death of a six-year-old girl who was struck by a car and to gas shortages triggered by the 1973 oil crisis. Van Oosteren, who grew up in the Netherlands before moving to France, said the rise of cycling in both countries was partially driven by high gas prices.Īt the beginning of the 1970s, "the Netherlands was like Canada today: a car-centric country, where the car was the foundation of transport, and it was very unpleasant and dangerous to travel by bicycle,” said van Oosteren, who was in Montreal this week to speak at the Go vélo bicycle festival. Stein van Oosteren, spokesperson for a Paris-based cycling association, says the time is right for Canadian cities to make big gains in changing the way people move around. And with the soaring cost of gasoline and new vehicles, urban transit experts say the rest of Canada should look to Montreal for lessons on how to boost cycling culture. “It's a really pleasant way of going from A to B.”Ĭollette said that while getting around Montreal isn't difficult without a personal vehicle, she's not sure doing so would be as easy in many other Canadian cities. “When it’s sunny and warm, it’s really pleasant,” Collette said of her bicycle commutes. Montrealer Olivia Collette sold her car in 2016 and hasn't looked back.Ĭollette, a communications consultant living in central Montreal, said getting around using a bicycle, a car-sharing service or a transit pass has not only saved her money, it's often more enjoyable.
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