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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

It's not been without its detractors [0], but overall the mayor remains quite popular and making Montreal more accessible to bikes and pedestrians has been a consistent priority since the beginning of her mandate.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bike-paths-park-ex-m...

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The issue is that, in typical Quebec (and Canadian) fashion, the entire thing has 0 vision or innovation to it. The shift to a more walkable city has been to imitate European cities as is, as if Montreal isn't different from say, Amsterdam or Copenhagen.

For most of the year, due to the cold and snow, the bike lanes are unused and are not convertible to anything else. Sure, some people still bike in the very cold months but that's an extreme minority that inherently includes mostly young, mostly fit cyclists. (Yes European cities also have winters, but they are usually way milder, even in northern cities like Stockholm)

Now, I'm still fully on board of having a walking/biking centric city when it makes sense, so convertible infrastructure would have been amazing. But instead we get half of the roads being unusable for anything during the colder months (look at St-Denis st. for example). Not even for bus transit. Which is to me ridiculous and is again, typical of Montreal's infrastructure projects.

In Finland, people cycle in the winter all the time.

Montreal is colder than Helsinki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal#Climate

Yes, but it doesn't really make a difference. You end up needing the same gear and you get to a point where you expend enough energy biking that you actually have to vent and cool down. The big pain points are salt on the road and lack of infrastructure.

IME, the snow is really the killer for bikes. And there is a lot more snow in Montreal than in anywhere in Europe! The snow is also usually salted, so there's a permanent "slush" like cover on the roads...

Cykling is worst around the freezing point (32F/0C), when things get icy and super slippery.

When it gets colder, you just have to dress for the temperature.

Both directions of the bike lanes on St-Denis take up about one car lane. The street has 2 lanes for car traffic and 2 more lanes for street parking on most sections of the road. I think that's a fair trade-off for the very high traffic the bike lanes receive on non-snow months. Not all public infrastructure needs to be used at capacity all the time (like public swimming pools, playgrounds, tennis/basketball courts, un-plowed walking paths, etc).

Although Montreal is leading the way to sustainable transportation, I don't think Montreal is copying European cities enough. Most of the biking infrastructure around the city is paint on roads making it a patch work system that kids and elderly people can't use safely.

I don't think it's fair to say that crucial roads should be underutilized, especially for crucial main streets! I agree with you that saint Denis is very very heavily used by cyclists in the warmer months, and I agree that the "paint a line" types of bike lanes are a cop out. But I think that Montreal should've explored convertible, semi permanent infrastructure. Not simple painted lines, but not inflexible set in concrete paths either.

We could've even set a new "standard" for cities that face the same challenges! That way, there's no trade off. We could use it in the winter for bus/priority lanes, and have the very useful and safe bike lanes in the summer. Sure, I don't know of anywhere else that implemented something similar, but that's the point :)

> For most of the year, due to the cold and snow, the bike lanes are unused and are not convertible to anything else. Sure, some people still bike in the very cold months but that's an extreme minority that inherently includes mostly young, mostly fit cyclists. (Yes European cities also have winters, but they are usually way milder, even in northern cities like Stockholm)

Not Just Bikes covered this..

https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU

> Sure, some people still bike in the very cold months but that's an extreme minority that inherently includes mostly young, mostly fit cyclists.

It's very much the same in my decidedly European country.

Recently I was doing an errand that I knew would be the easiest to do by bike, since my destination was less than 6km away and I have bike lanes/tempo 30 streets all the way up to there. But it was raining, so I decided against that and took an Uber because I don't need this sort of excitement in my life.

And with all that I'm still below average in terms of frequency of choosing to drive.

People, unsurprisingly, don't enjoy the logistics of cycling in inclement weather and they will go as far as to sit in traffic and spend 20 minutes looking for a parking spot instead.

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