N.D.G. bike path: good or bad?
NDG-CDN borough is planning new bike paths. The Gazette extensively quotes Marvin Rotrand’s get-off-my-lawn sputtering: “These bike paths are being created much more for ideological reasons, rather than for pragmatic reasons. We have an administration that thinks owning a car is anti-social and they have to be punished, and that cyclists are superior human beings.”
Meantime, the borough messed up painting a bike path on Grand Boulevard.
Kevin 09:49 on 2019-07-19 Permalink
Lots of people who use Isabella will not be happy with this proposal to make Isabella a feeder street to Decarie.
ProposMontréal 10:51 on 2019-07-19 Permalink
It’s a vicious circle, If you don’t have the instrastructure, people will not use their bikes and if people don’t bike, the authorities will not build the infrastructure. Rotrand doesn’t seem to understand that.
jeather 11:45 on 2019-07-19 Permalink
Isabella already is a feeder street to Decarie. This just makes it more explicit.
YUL514 12:01 on 2019-07-19 Permalink
“Rotrand said he is particularly concerned about the plan for Isabella Ave., saying the borough is considering making that street one-way for eastbound traffic only from Macdonald Ave. to Décarie, and then one-way for westbound traffic on the other side of Décarie.”
Rotrand is right, that area is already a cluster bomb because the city doesn’t bother adding an extra 20 seconds to the lights running perpendicular to Decarie.
Making Isabella 1 way around there would just add to the congestion, I’m convinced that Projet lives in another city with these in the fly ideas.
jeather 14:33 on 2019-07-19 Permalink
There was a brief period where Decarie was a 4 minute light and Isabella was a 25 second light. That was fun.
Chris 14:40 on 2019-07-19 Permalink
YUL514, not necessarily; oftentimes reducing a (road) network capacity reduces congestion. Read about Cheonggyecheon.
Patrick 14:41 on 2019-07-19 Permalink
The Gazette article talks about a bike path on Jean-Brillant between Decelles and Edouard-Montpetit. Shouldn’t it be Decelles between J-B and E-M? Just the other day there was a story about making Jean-Brillant a pedestrian street because of all the foot traffic from UdeM.
Kevin 15:57 on 2019-07-19 Permalink
@jeather
Plenty of people head west on Isabella and go to Hampstead or upper NDG.
Lots of people use Isabella to cross Decarie especially the employees going to and from the hospitals.
And while they may bike in the summer they’re not going to do that in the rain or in the snow.
They’ll get jobs elsewhere if we make it too difficult for them to commute.
jeather 20:35 on 2019-07-19 Permalink
I know the area. I think the change is a bad idea for various reasons, but also, because of the way the Decarie is set up, Isabella is the street to take from the west if you want to end up going north on Decarie, and having just one lane means it’s backed up all the time. (Queen Mary is very backed up across Decarie now too — this will be exacerbated if Isabella changes.) So making it one way will make explicit what is already the case. (One car-based solution would be extending Cavendish.)
But I seriously doubt people are going to quit their jobs at the hospital en masse.