It’s always encouraging to see that the European capitals of urban design and livability weren’t
always like that. The Dutch didn’t always have their bike paths, and it was just a few years ago
that Paris used its riverbanks as highways. Some cities do start with more advantages when it comes
to density or mixed-use neighbourhoods, but at the same time every city has a lot of latitude about
what direction it wants to go. On this channel we talk a lot about the urbanism of Montreal,
but Montreal wasn’t always like this either. Living here has been an exciting experience
of seeing the city actively get better, and learning that features we took for granted
didn’t even exist until surprisingly recently. In this video we’re going to showcase 9 urbanist
transformations in Montreal that we haven’t given much attention to on this channel yet.
This intersection where Parc Avenue meets downtown still isn’t the nicest place in the city but it
used to be so much worse. For almost 50 years it was an awkwardly shaped highway interchange that
forced pedestrians to cross using confusing and dangerous underground pathways. It probably didn’t
even help traffic flow very much, since this is an urban environment with traffic lights not too
far away on all sides. The current non-crazy layout was completed in 2006 or 2007 and it
made the intersection look more like it did in the 1950s. Today it’s an important cycling connection
to downtown and McGill University. This cross street — Pine Avenue or Avenue des Pins — has
been getting much better for cyclists too. Five years ago it got some underwhelming painted lanes,
but over the past year it’s been getting upgraded to high-quality protected lanes.
Back in 2009, Laurier Avenue East was a wide road with up to four lanes for driving and parking cars
lined with only modest sidewalks. Over a few iterations the street became one way for cars
with more limited parking and two painted bike lanes, which work well enough on the relatively
low traffic street, seeing 650,000 cyclists a year. Special attention in the form of really
wide sidewalks was given to the Metro station and elementary school. The space at the Metro station
gets used for events like a farmers’ market and we often see kids and parents biking to school here,
although it’s under renovation right now. The intermediary step using only paint to reduce
space for cars was an improvement, but the full redesign with trees looks so much nicer.
The rest of the street didn’t get quite the same treatment, but it does have bike lanes,
less traffic, more room for businesses, and the elimination of this road into Laurier Park.
Other parks in Montreal have also had their roads removed or converted.
Baldwin Park has two examples — this pathway was converted from a road with parking around 2009,
and this other pathway got the same treatment ten years later.
This park also saw an iterative transformation of this road going through it: in 2016 it was a
standard road with parking, in 2018 the sidewalks were extended to take over the parking spots;
in 2019 the road was blocked off with planters and signs; and then 2020 saw the street actually
incorporated into the park, with a nice bike path. Other parks around the city are currently in the
process of reclaiming roads. Parc Lafontaine is in the midst of a 10-year phase out of the
roads going through it, and just within the past few weeks, Duluth Avenue in this park was closed
to cars using bollards with the long-term goal of reincorporating it into the park.
What about access for utility vehicles? That’s actually not a problem at all,
city vehicles use pedestrian pathways for maintenance and landscaping all the time.
On top of the Laurier project, many other schools have also had road improvements.
This really nice pedestrian plaza near a school used to be a through road just a few years ago.
This modal filter — blocking cars but allowing cyclists and pedestrians — was added behind that
school sometime after 2011. Universities have been working on more people-friendly designs too.
McGill pedestrianized McTavish Street over a few iterative steps since 2010, the engineering school
ETS pedestrianized this street on its campus, and Saint-Denis Street near the University of
Quebec at Montreal was redone with wider sidewalks and a concrete paver surface.
Unfortunately there’s still a long way to go, especially on safety for grade schools;
a seven-year-old was killed recently near her school by a driver who fled the scene. The city
has promised wider sidewalks and traffic diversion near schools but in the meantime, drivers were
recorded making almost one illegal turn per minute at the intersection where she was killed.
This urban boulevard wasn’t always here. For half a century commuters from the South Shore passed
through here on an elevated urban highway called the Bonaventure Expressway. In 2016 demolition
started to reconfigure the space into the current at-grade boulevard featuring art, a playground,
an outdoor gym, and vantage points to watch trains coming into Montreal’s Central Station. The linear
park actually gets more foot traffic than we might expect given the unfortunate traffic noise,
but the location is right between downtown, Old Montreal,
and the revitalized Griffintown neighbourhood.
Villeray Street, which connects Montreal’s busiest bike corridor to one of its most
lively parks through a dense neighbourhood, was turned into a “vélo rue” or “bike street” in 2021.
Cars were reduced to one direction with a modal filter near the park, meaning that cars can access
this street if they live here or want to go to a shop but it’s no longer an appealing route
for through traffic. Another recently-installed bike road on Island Street connects cyclists from
the Lachine Canal through Point-Saint-Charles, with seating and other amenities like a park. No
project is ever going to have unanimous support but for whatever reason opposing neighbours here
felt energized enough to print signs. And finally this street was reconfigured in 2021
to be something of a bike street with a really unique twist: outside of the bike lane, most of
the road was turned into a functional community garden with greenhouses — “kale bonne idée”!
There are too many examples to even try to start naming them all, but Montreal
has made heavy use of curb extensions near intersections and other crosswalks.
Narrowing the road slows down drivers and getting rid of parking at key crossing
points makes pedestrians more visible. A few areas even have these reflectors
making the narrowing of the road and presence of pedestrians more visibly obvious to drivers.
Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, one of the city’s most urbanist boroughs, recently announced a
plan to charge heavier vehicles more for street parking permits. The rates are still surprisingly
low — a year of street parking shouldn’t cost as much as a month of public transit — but it’s
a step in the right direction in encouraging smaller, safer, and more efficient vehicles.
Montreal’s extremely popular BIXI bike share network has historically been available for
seven months of the year, owing to the city’s harsh winter. But biking in the winter has been
getting more and more popular as the city’s gotten better at clearing the bike lanes, and it was only
a matter of time before BIXI expanded into winter too. This coming winter the city is doing a pilot
project prioritizing stations near the express bike routes. The BIXIs will be equipped with
studded tires and only regular non-electric bikes will be available, because batteries don’t do so
well left out in the cold. To be clear, harsh winter weather doesn’t actually last for a full
five month span in Montreal, but that’s about the span of time when it can snow, and one of
the challenges they were working to address was the stations getting in the way of snow clearing.
We don’t want to give the impression that Montreal is an urbanist paradise or anything, at least not
as a whole, but the city does have some really good pockets as well as a level of momentum and
popular support for improving itself that feels genuinely unique among North American cities we’ve
lived in or visited. Housing affordability is a major concern, as it is elsewhere,
but in other respects Montreal is a better place to live today than it was 10 years ago, and it’ll
be better 10 years in the future. There’s actually so much to talk about that we might do another one
of these in the future, so let us know your favourite urban improvements in Montreal.
Finally, because we relied on Google Street View to get information on some of the old
configurations, some of the dates for when the changes were made might be off by a year.
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. Don’t forget to bike and subscribe,
and a special thanks to our supporters on Patreon.