Here in Canada, one of the most common concerns that people have about new bike infrastructure
in cities is that it's a waste because it won't get used in the winter. We think this
view is mistaken, and in this video we're going to explain why.
First of all, winter cycling is more common than a lot of people might think. As we covered
in another video, Montreal cycle counters record an average of three to five thousand
cyclists per day from December to March.
That's much lower than the 50,000 cyclists per day in the summer months, but it's not
negligible at all. For context, going by average high temperature in January, Montreal’s
winters are colder than Toronto or Copenhagen but similar to Moscow or Minneapolis.
And winter cycling has been trending upwards as infrastructure maintenance has improved.
The single bike counter with the most consistent data availability over the years, which is
on Berri Street between Ontario and de Maisonneuve, saw its number of January cyclists quadruple
between 2009 and 2020.
With that said, we accept the reality that winter cycling will always be more challenging
and as a result less common than summer cycling, especially in Canada, which has harsher winters
than most of Europe and the United States. The cold requires bundling up, ice is dangerous,
snow and slush are messy, and road salt wears down your bike.
But the critical thing people tend to forget is that winter seriously interferes with most
outdoor activities, even something as simple as walking somewhere or going for a jog. People
on foot have to deal with the same unpleasant and dangerous conditions too.
Bikes might have unique challenges, like more wind on your face from going fast, but even
as pretty prolific walkers there’s no question that winter reduces the length of our walking
trips and sometimes makes us not want to go out walking at all.
Despite this, no one really uses winter to argue that sidewalks are a waste of space
and shouldn’t exist. Everyone accepts that it’s important to give people the option
to walk places or jog for exercise, even in the winter when those activities happen less.
When you think about it, there are literally dozens of other things taking up space despite
being used less in winter: tennis and volleyball courts, soccer fields, amusement parks, public
pools, personal backyards, beaches, and probably most public parks.
Laurier Park on a winter evening isn’t exactly deserted, there are still people walking or
playing hockey, but it’s not at all bustling like it would be on a summer evening. And
here’s an example of a playground that exists despite actually being closed in the winter.
Even driving is not immune to the challenges of winter. You’re protected from the cold,
but other parts of winter are still unpleasant or dangerous in a car. Our society goes to
great lengths to make driving function year round, including winter tires, lots of snow
shovelling, and in Montreal, industrial-scale snow removal operations by the city.
And people recognize the challenges of winter driving. Almost half of Canadians report feeling
anxious or nervous about driving in the winter, and understandably so. We don’t have data
from Canada, but motor vehicle distance travelled in the United States drops between 10 and
20% from the summer peak to the winter low, depending on the region.
Granted, that’s not as big of a drop as we saw for bikes. Maybe that’s a testament
to the resilience of motor vehicles, or maybe it’s because so many of those drivers live
in places where driving is the only way to get around, while cyclists in Montreal can
often fall back on taking the metro if conditions above ground are bad enough.
But this does still make our point that most outdoor activities happen less in the winter.
We can’t be surprised that this is also the case for cycling, and we definitely shouldn’t
uniquely withhold infrastructure from bikes because they’re used less in winter.
Fundamentally, the idea that bike infrastructure shouldn’t exist because it’s not adequately
used in the winter is an argument about efficiently using space. However, it’s kind of weird
to see space efficiency used as an argument in favour of cars.
Personal motor vehicles take up more space per person than any other method of transportation,
including walking, cycling, and public transit, both when moving and when stored in parking.
One parking spot for a car could easily hold five to ten bikes, and a trip on foot or on
transit doesn’t need parking at all.
Despite these heavy space requirements, car infrastructure seems to be built to meet the
times with highest demand, not the lowest demand. The City of Burlington, Ontario explains
that the standard for shopping centres is to provide enough car parking to meet the
20th busiest hour of the year, which is typically around Christmas.
That means providing enough car parking to meet the top 0.2% of demand. That’s how
you get commercial areas where parking takes up more space than the stores themselves,
not to mention the wide multi-lane roads to funnel cars there.
If it’s considered normal to plan car infrastructure for even the top 1% of demand, it seems weird
to criticize bike infrastructure because of the season with the bottom 30% of demand,
especially when bike infrastructure in general is much less space intensive.
On Rachel Street, one of Montreal’s iconic bike corridors, all it took to create comfortable
cycling was three metres of a fifteen metre wide road, physically separated from motor
vehicles. Some bike lanes are more spacious, but in pretty much every context it takes
much less space to accommodate bikes than to accommodate cars.
One final point to consider, if winter really was the one big thing standing in the way
of people accepting cycling infrastructure, we might expect that colder climates would
have less cycling and warmer climates would have more, but that’s not the case at all.
If anything, it’s the opposite. The Copenhagenize Index of Bicycle-Friendly Cities has a lot
more places from the northern half of Europe, as far north as Oslo and Helsinki, than from
the southern half. And the only two North American cities to feature on it, Vancouver
and Montreal, are from Canada, not milder American climates. This suggests that winter
is less a barrier to cycling than culture and political will.
So, to summarize, winter is not a good argument against bike lanes because, number one, biking
is less common in the winter but it’s hardly negligible, at least with decent infrastructure
and maintenance; number two, most other outdoor things are less common in the winter too,
including walking and driving; and number three, bikes don’t take up much space in
general, so if you’re looking to use city space more efficiently, fewer bikes and more
cars isn’t really the way to go.