Montreal City Weblog

Kate 09:33 on 2022-08-08 Permalink Reply  

• DeWolf 10:37 on 2022-08-08 Permalink

  The advantage of putting new REVs on main arteries is that they’re arteries for a reason – they go places. Because of Montreal’s street layout, secondary streets are often interrupted which will mean a lot of zig-zagging and detours.

  Jean-Talon in particular is an ideal candidate for a REV, because it covers a huge distance from east to west, it follows the blue line for much of its length, it runs through many dense neighbourhoods, and it also serves up-and-coming areas like the Triangle that have a lot of new development. As it exists today, Jean-Talon is a horrific, unpleasant street for everyone – drivers included. Sherbrooke would also be fantastic for similar reasons, but I imagine it would be politically even more difficult, despite being quite a wide street with enough room for a bike path on each side.

  All of that said, the professor is right that there also needs to be a focus on secondary streets. In particular, we need more traffic-calmed streets that have deviators that allow pedestrians and cyclists to continue while preventing through traffic. Clark has already been traffic-calmed to an extent, but somehow it still gets a lot of through traffic. If the city stepped up its game, put in more deviators and allowed two-way bike traffic on the entire stretch (it’s currently limited to the bit from Laurier to Rachel), it could become a viable north-south alternative to both St-Urbain and St-Denis.

• JanSolo 17:05 on 2022-08-08 Permalink

  I agree that the REV appears to be very successful at the moment. However, we’re in the height of summer. I worry that we’ll get a million passengers during the warm months and almost none at all during the winter.

• jeleventybillionandone 17:13 on 2022-08-08 Permalink

  There’s definitely been an effort to further extend the Clark street bike path south (in fact, at some point in 2020, bike route signage was added, parking signs updated, etc.) but for whatever reason this was quickly reversed in less than a week. There are still plans for an extension according to Alexander Norris, but whatever caused the signage changed to be reversed I guess is still a barrier to be overcome.

• DeWolf 17:25 on 2022-08-08 Permalink

  You can see the counts for the REV St-Denis here: https://data.eco-counter.com/public2/?id=300016032

  In January 2022, most days saw 200-400 passages, and that was in a lockdown with a curfew. That’s about 10-20 times less than in summer, but the cost of maintaining seasonal bike paths without the benefits of traffic calming and greening far outweighs the cost of maintaining a year-round path even if usage is low in the dead of winter.

• Orr 22:04 on 2022-08-10 Permalink

  @Dewolf: Bellechasse has a rev and it parallels Jean-Talon. I use it all the time. I like that it’s not a mega-busy street like JT or St-Denis. REV map shows another REV (REV phase 2 type thing, not quite sure exactly where) a bit to the north that extends farther east & west than Bellechasse does. Definitely looking forward to this.
  The benefit of cleaning a bike path network in winter is that when spring suddenly arrives, the bike path is ready for the cyclists. I’m a bit tired waiting for bike paths to be cleaned & reopened in May when spring weather & bike-as-transportation season started at end of march.