We did a lot of cycling in and around Montreal during the pandemic, but almost all of it
was recreational. With work-from-home and lots of things shut down, there just weren’t
a lot of places we needed to go, meaning that most of our cycling was exercise or exploring.
That’s why we were excited recently to have a specific necessary destination to bike to:
our vaccine appointments. We picked the vaccination centres with the earliest time slots, so we
can use these semi-random destinations in central Montreal as a test or demonstration
of the city’s bike infrastructure for utility cycling.
My appointment was at the new University of Montreal campus at the edge of Outremont,
which is just under a four kilometre bike ride from where we live in the Plateau. We
started with a half-kilometre stretch on Villeneuve, which only has painted sharrows for cyclists
but it doesn’t really matter because it’s a slow, low-traffic street where drivers are
used to bikes. We then turned right onto Clark, which is an excellent two-way cycle track
with wide concrete separation and low traffic volumes, at least for most of the 1.5 kilometre
stretch that we rode on it. This residential street passes through some important commercial
streets in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, including Fairmount and St-Viateur of Montreal
bagel shop fame.
At the end of Clark we did some sharp turns to go under the train tracks and end up on
La Piste des Carrières, a multifunctional trail and linear park following alongside
freight rail tracks. On this trip we were only on this trail for a third of a kilometre,
but it goes on for another few kilometres in the other direction and it’s a pleasant
and useful neighbourhood connector. Unfortunately at the very western end this well-used trail
just ends, throwing you onto a car-dominated stretch of Beaubien, which is an obvious gap
in Montreal’s bike network. We’ve had some bad experiences with aggressive drivers
here, so it’s one of the places we sometimes choose to ride on the sidewalk depending on
the traffic levels.
Fortunately this only lasted for about half-a-kilometre and it’s a better experience once you get
to the University of Montreal’s new development, whose wide elevated bike lanes took us to
the vaccination centre set up on campus. We saw numerous other people arrive at this vaccine
centre on bike, although of course people arrived by foot, transit, and car too. Overall
Montreal’s bike infrastructure served this trip well except for the embarrassing gap
of Beaubien.
My appointment was further away, at a church in Pointe-Saint-Charles, which is around an
eight kilometre bike ride from home in the opposite direction. We planned our trip to
take some key routes that you’ve seen featured on this channel before, especially the always
pleasant REV on St-Denis and the pretty good two-way cycle track on Berri. There ended
up being construction on Berri, but there were signs set up to separate cyclists from
pedestrians when possible.
After almost 4 kilometres on these routes we ended up in Old Montreal, which has a few
different paths allowing pedestrians and cyclists to avoid car traffic, although as one of the
main tourist destinations of the city it can get crowded at certain times. We continued
through Old Montreal to end up on the Lachine Canal, which has the same advantage of keeping
you well away from cars and the same disadvantage that it can get pretty busy at peak hours.
Maybe that’s a lesson that people like places and routes free from cars.
The very last stretch to get to my appointment was on Island Street in Pointe-Saint-Charles,
which has been redone with traffic calming measures and pedestrian amenities as part
of the city’s shared streets initiative. The project is taking place in a few stages,
so what you see here is not the final version. There were actually lots of residences on
this street with signs against the project, which is surprising because Montrealers, at
least in the central city, tend to be pretty supportive of initiatives for pedestrians
and cyclists. The opposition is based around a Facebook page, which we checked out to try
to better understand their concerns, but the most concrete issues we can see are related
to confusing signage and subpar snow removal. Anyway, we were happy with the street for
the purposes of getting us to this appointment.
My appointment trip of eight kilometres was pretty well-served by Montreal’s bike infrastructure,
and at basically no point did we have to contend with cars. One issue to mention though is
that we intentionally went around downtown to use the routes we knew to be pleasant,
which added a bit of distance. For science, on another day we did the same trip but took
a more direct route through downtown, and it wasn’t enjoyable. Instead of the comfortable
ride on St-Denis, we fought with buses and cement trucks on a completely unprotected
painted lane on St-Urbain. There are very real bike infrastructure gaps in downtown,
particularly if you’re travelling to the water, although the planned express bike corridor
on Peel should help with this.
Thanks for watching our informal test of Montreal’s bike network. We’re just excited in general
with the pace of vaccination in Canada and we thought of these rides as marking the beginning
of the world going back to normal, with the return of utility cycling where we actually
have places to bike to and we can’t choose the route purely based on enjoyment, although
through all of this we’ve been well aware that being able to work from home is a luxury
not everyone has.