Montreal City Weblog

Kate 19:16 on 2023-11-13 Permalink Reply  

• Ian 09:08 on 2023-11-14 Permalink

  It looks like bus lanes are really the most underserved …

  But again, I wonder about how representative these numbers are of the situation on the ground – it looks like there are WAY more sidewalks than are needed for pedesstrians, but we know that in walkable parts of the city there are, by default, sidewalks everywhere – it’s what makes it walkable.

  I’m remindd of the joke:
  A pessimist sees the glass as half empty.
  An optimist sees the glass as half full.
  An engineer sees the glass as the wrong size.

• DeWolf 09:32 on 2023-11-14 Permalink

  @Ian, from the article:

  “Et les piétons ? Les trottoirs occupent 18,8 % de l’espace public, pour seulement 11 % des déplacements pour la marche. Les piétons seraient donc avantagés ? Pas vraiment. Premièrement, les répondants au sondage sur les déplacements ont tendance à sous-estimer leurs déplacements à la marche. Deuxièmement, les trottoirs ont d’autres fonctions que le transport (aménagement urbain, plantation d’arbres). Ils sont absolument nécessaires pour l’aménagement urbain. Imaginez une ville sans trottoirs…”

  The biggest takeaway is that we need 24/7 reserved bus lanes on major routes. That would improve reliability and make it easier to increase frequencies.

  For bike infrastructure, as the article explains despite there being bike paths “everywhere” in the minds of disgruntled motorists, they still don’t account for the share of people getting around by bike. And most crucially these are numbers for the entire island. The Plateau has the most bike infrastructure of any borough, and yet it still only accounts for a few percent of road space, but the modal share for cycling there is 20% or more. (It was 15% during the last transport survey but that was nearly 10 years ago…)

• Ian 12:30 on 2023-11-14 Permalink

  Well yeah, that’s kind of my point too.
  FWIW I do think that bike infrastructure needs to be analyzed by neighbourhood, putting new bike trails on Gouin doesn’t help MIle End, where there are more bicyclists per capita than most of the rest of the island …
  But at the same time it’s important to note that for real infrastructure support you should have universal access as much as possible.

  The point isn’t what percentage of roads are used by buses but that real public transit infra requires a fully accessible network, just like we actually need sidewalks all over town, roads, and bike paths.

  Arguing about percentages is an accountant’s game. That distracts from the real issue at hand. There is more to public transit infrastructure policy than how many people took the bus to work downtown from other parts of central Montreal last Monday.

• Joey 12:38 on 2023-11-14 Permalink

  Of all the political parties in the world, Projet Montreal should have a standard, well-thought out vision for ideal roadways that should apply to each street that winds up being redone. Enough of this nonsense where we have to litigate each re-arrangement ad nauseum – adopt a rule that says each street will eventually have contribute to creating adequate pedestrian, cycling, driving and parking infrastructure and then go implement your vision.

• Ian 12:55 on 2023-11-14 Permalink

  Agreed, but then there’s the argument in favour of creating intensive use corridors like the REM or REV which takes us back to the beginning of the infra debate loop.

• bumper carz 13:24 on 2023-11-14 Permalink

  @Ian: ” …putting new bike trails on Gouin doesn’t help MIle End, where there are more bicyclists per capita than most of the rest of the island …”

  And putting a new beach in Point-aux-Trembles doesn’t help the bathers of Oka, which has more swimmers than… any other area of the region of MTL that doesn’t have a beach or pool.

  You have to build the infra BEFORE people can use it.

• Ian 14:41 on 2023-11-14 Permalink

  Yeah I don’t think bike paths on Gouin will increase population density but ok.