Three-and-a-half percent of people on the island of Montreal use a bike as their main
method of commuting. That doesn’t sound like a lot, and in a certain sense it’s
not. Cars and public transit dominate commuting across the island, with walking in third place.
But city-wide averages hide the local details. There’s actually a large section of the
city, almost 40 square kilometres, where cycling ranges from 5 to 22% of the commuting share.
Montreal’s “cycling city” isn’t the majority of the island but it exists and it’s
reasonably large.
The main cluster starts at the northeast edge of downtown and stretches to Outremont, Villeray,
and Viauville. A smaller secondary hotspot of cycle commuting can be found to the southwest
of downtown, between Notre-Dame-de-Grace, Little Burgundy, and Verdun.
Another thing that city-wide averages don’t show is growth. Back in 1996, this concentration
of cycling was only starting to take shape. Every new census year after this shows a visible
increase in cycling as a method of commuting, especially around the main cluster.
To put some numbers to it, over the 20 year span from 1996 to 2016, the highest rate of
cycle commuting found in the city rose from 13 to 22%. In the same time, the area covered
by our 5% threshold for a cycling hotspot massively expanded from 8 to 38 square kilometres.
If you’re interested in urbanism and cycling like we are, it’s easy to see the European
heavyweights like Amsterdam and Copenhagen and wonder why we can’t be more like them.
But actually looking at the data shows that we are making concrete progress, especially
if you think through a more local or neighbourhood lens like we’re doing here.
We’ve set a high bar here by focusing on cycle commuting, because work is usually an
inflexible location that tends to be further away than other trips like stores and parks—but
it’s an important gold standard of bike friendliness because of how often you have
to go.
So, why did cycling take off in some parts of the city and not others? The obvious answer
to us is infrastructure. On this bike lane map you can see that the centre of cycle commuting
in the city also happens to noticeably have the densest and most connected series of bike
lanes. We biked all over Montreal this summer and this corner of the city really is the
best built for it.
There’s plenty of bike infrastructure elsewhere too, but it’s rarely this consistent and
practical to use. For example, both Saint-Leonard and the Town of Mont-Royal have some modest
bike lanes that are moderately useful once you get there, but they’re distinctly disconnected
from any larger network, so actually getting there from other neighbourhoods is a pain,
in our experience.
Over in the West Island, they actually have some respectable east-west routes but we found
travelling north-south to be a nightmare. Biking down Boulevard des Sources was a genuinely
awful experience, and not just because we crossed a highway onramp and had a tire explode.
A second possible explanation for Montreal’s cycle commuting patterns is the location of
jobs. It would make sense if boroughs with more local jobs could sustain more cycle commuting
than boroughs whose residents had to travel longer distances to work.
This has to matter but it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. The four boroughs with the most
bicycle commuting are only in the middle of the pack when it comes to local jobs per person.
Granted, it probably helps that they’re reasonably close to the big job centre of
downtown, but there are plenty of jobs and job centres elsewhere on the island.
Those peripheral job centres probably do have more people with jobs that really need a motor
vehicle, for example to bring tools to a job site, but it’s hard to imagine that this
is so common that 5 or 10% cycle commuting is out of the question with better development
and infrastructure.
With all of that said, there are parts of the city that really are job deserts. Montreal-North,
Cote-St-Luc, and Pierrefonds-Roxboro all have few local jobs and they’re not in great
proximity to other large job centres, whether because of space or other barriers like train
tracks.
One final factor for bike commuting that we’ll mention is elevation. The neighbourhood of
Côte-des-Neiges in particular is probably disadvantaged by its hilly geography. We’ve
biked from there to downtown, going through Westmount, and let’s just say it’s quite
the workout.
That’s all for our look at bicycle commuting in Montreal. To summarize, bicycle commuting
has actually grown a lot in Montreal over the past 20 years, mainly in the neighbourhoods
that built the most bike infrastructure and at least have reasonable proximity to jobs.
If you have anything to add, including personal experiences bike commuting, let us know in
the comments.