Montreal City Weblog

Kate 13:18 on 2026-07-12 Permalink Reply  

• bob 17:41 on 2026-07-12 Permalink

  That’s what someone says it says, but it is absolutely not what this study says.

  What it said was that bike paths play no role in the increase of restaurants within 150m of bike paths in Montreal, except downtown*. That is, bike paths have no positive impact. They did not look at negative impact: “the analysis does not account for how bike lanes might influence the stability or survival of these establishments [restaurants] over time or their individual performance measured by revenues” it should be noted that in the center of Montreal you are always within 150m of a restaurant, unless you are up high in a tall building – and downtown there’s Les Enfants Terribles, Portus 360, some other rooftops (you have to leave your bike downstairs).

  As to business other than restaurants, the study says nothing. it would have been interesting if they looked at something like, say, dry cleaners, or magazine stores. How many butcher shops have opened in the last ten, twenty years, or furniture stores, or pharmacies.

  • Their reasoning about downtown is goofy. The increase in bike traffic is mainly due to the universities (as they say). Students do not bike to restaurants downtown, they bike to school. They are already downtown, however they got there (they didn’t bike there in February), and they graze the neighbourhood for pizza and shwarma. It has nothing to do with a bike path.

  In any case if a car-related reason is killing local business it is parking lots – the ones outside Costco and Walmart where you can drive to buy everything available on any three block stretch of commercial artery (and some of those local merchants are selling you stuff they got at Costco and Walmart). The problem is not that people can’t park in front of your hardware store, it is that your hardware store is obsolete, and your heirs want nothing to do with selling hardware, and anyway your landlord is going to double or triple your rent in the hopes of winning the franchise location lottery.

  As this study points out, bike paths do not cause revitalization, they are merely a part of a revitalization that follows gentrification. The people who are using the bike paths are mostly not using them for commercial purposes. And, yes, for every example one can give of a commercial thing you do not do on a bike, there’s some chimer-inner with an exception proving the rule – “Oh, I bike to the hardware store to buy paint all the time. All my DIY projects have been supplied by cycling to pick up two by fours, drywall, and pipes. I brought my kitchen cabinets home on a Bixi.” Fact is, bike paths are not for commerce, never were, never will be. And picking up a baguette on the way home is not going to float a commercial stretch. The bike paths are irrelevant to it, and are just an effect of shifting preferences among part of the bourgeois, erm… middle class.

  The fact is that bike paths do not help local business en masse, but maybe a few kinds of them, and a lack of parking is not what is driving local stores into the ground – a ten-story mechanical parking garage across the street will not save you from the dust bin. The stuff that all the bike path advocates can get at a big box store will be gotten at the big box store, everything else one can order online will be delivered by UPS, and the local businesses competing with those modes will all die, the way steakhouses and magazine stores died due to social and economic changes. Bike paths have so little to do with any of this. They are the sesame seeds on the bun. They don’t wreak havoc, and they do not save the world.

• Kate 18:30 on 2026-07-12 Permalink

  Thank you for the analysis, bob.

• CE 22:48 on 2026-07-12 Permalink

  This is just me but I bike everywhere most of the year and the amount of shopping I’ve done on St-Denis has gone from almost zero to quite often since the REV opened. I don’t even do all my shopping on St-Denis by bike but the fact that I commute along that stretch has made me much more aware of what is on offer and the quieting of the street has made me more likely to want to walk there (or eat/drink on a terrace).

• DeWolf 15:59 on 2026-07-13 Permalink

  Echoing CE — since the REV has opened I’ve gone from spending zero dollars per year on St-Denis to spending, well, a lot more than that. There have even been times when I’ve passed by Quai des brumes when a band was doing its soundcheck in the afternoon and gone back for the show in the evening. That probably wouldn’t have happened before because I was almost never on St-Denis and now I’m on it at least twice a day.

  Anecdotal, of course, but the economic impact of a bike path is extremely hard to measure. I don’t think bob is right when he says it makes virtually no difference. There are other studies indicating cyclists and pedestrians spend more money on urban commercial streets than drivers. But you’d need a much broader and more rigorous study than the one cited in the article to really understand the impact.