New park on Mount Royal: one step closer

A piece of good news for anyone looking forward to the completion of the bike path around Mount Royal: the City announced on May 22 that it had secured the lease of two parcels of land from the University of Montreal and the Parish of Notre-Dame de Montréal. The 23 hectares of land (that's 56 acres for you Imperialists) will be used for the creation of a park on the so-called "third summit", or Outremont summit, of the mountain. Once it's completed in 2012, the bike (and pedestrian) path will wend its way through this new park. Personally, I can't wait.

Double the Fun: Expanding Montreal's Bike Path Network

In May of 2007, Mayor Tremblay announced his government's new transportation plan for the city. That plan included 21 Development Plans to reinvent transportation in Montreal over 10 years and 5 billion dollars (they're being referred to as chantiers in French, which sounds less bureaucratic and more exciting to my ear, as if we're going to have hundreds of people running around the city in yellow hardhats - which we will, I guess, if all 21 plans are put into action).

Transportation Plan in English
Transportation Plan in French (more detail)

A few of those 21 Development Plans are so vague on paper that it will be difficult to know if they've ever been achieved; for example, "16. Restoring the appropriate quality of life to Montréal’s residential neighbourhoods". Many of them, however, are actually damn good ideas, like building a tramway network, and creating a rail shuttle between downtown and Trudeau airport (awe and envy filled me in equal measures last fall when I rode Vancouver's new Skytrain line from the airport to downtown Van).

My own personal chantier préféré, of course, is no. 13: "Doubling Montréal's bike path system within seven years". In other words, from 400 km in 2007, we can expect the network to expand to 800 km by 2014. Surprisingly, today in 2010 the City is more or less on schedule with this expansion, having currently 502 km in the network. Of course, we can't give them too much credit for this: some of the 'expansion' is really just sending out a crew to paint a new white line down one side of the street. But hey, that's better than nothing (unless you're one of those people who think bike lanes actually make cyclists less safe by making drivers less aware and more complacent - I'm not one of those people).


Existing network and planned expansions

In any case, on May 6 of this year the City announced the program of expansion will continue with another 50 km of bike paths/lanes. The sections which will be added to the network this year include the following (the maps are my own estimates of the routes these paths will take):


- 4.6 km of bike lanes along Senkus, Cordner and Laplante in LaSalle;


- 3.7 km along boulevard Pierre-Bernard and Desmarteau street in Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve;


- 12.7 km joining Berri, Lajeunesse, de Castelnau, Saint-Dominique and Bellechasse in Villeray-Saint-Michel-Parc-Extension and Ahuntsic-Cartierville (my map for this last section is complete speculation).

All of this in addition to the ring road around Mount Royal I mentioned in last week's post.

And finally something else for cyclists to look forward to: when the City announced the Transportation plan and the expansion of the bike path network, that expansion included building bike path along the entire CP railway line from Notre-Dame (just east of Frontenac), up to the existing bike path running from Masson/Fullum to Beaubien/Clark, and continuing north along the railway line to ile Perry/Gouin boulevard, where a bike bridge already connects to the Laval network. I'm not holding my breath on this one, but if it comes to pass, that will indeed be a cyclist's dream, a sort of cyclebahn to cross the city quickly and safely. This would take more or less the following route:



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In other news, on May 13 the City announced that the borough of Ahuntsic-Cartierville has adopted the 40 km/h residential speed limit, which will come into effect on August 3 of this year. The new speed limit applies only to residential streets. According to the City, the new limit should reduce the number of pedestrian fatalities: the probability of death when struck by a vehicle traveling at 50 km/h is 70%; that probability falls to 25% at 40 km/h. So don't worry, drivers, you've still got a 1 in 4 chance of killing your average pedestrian. Must have something to do with the 3,000 pounds of metal you've got to crush them with!

Happy cycling...

Ring road around the mountain

Coming home from yesterday evening’s ride up Mount Royal, I decided to scope out the planned route of the City of Montreal’s new bike path around the mountain. Oh, you haven’t heard of the new bike path? Don’t worry, neither had I until a friend forwarded me a link to a Gazette story on the planned expansion earlier this week.

Generally speaking, I’m happy about any addition to the city’s network of bike paths. I’m also afflicted by an innate scepticism about pretty much any endeavour undertaken by municipal government, so I had to find out more about the project, since the Gazette story is a little short on details.

I went digging on the City of Montreal’s website. It’s remarkable the random things you can find on there – a map of the City’s projected tramway network, for example – and also remarkable how difficult it is to find what you’re actually looking for… but I digress. I eventually found the following map:


The red and orange parts are either for bikes, or shared use (cyclists and pedestrians). The blue parts are pedestrian-only. I can’t provide you with a link to the full-size version of that map, because now I don’t know exactly where I found it (of course!). In any case, here is the city’s description of the project, with a link at the bottom of the page to a less detailed map of the route:

Chemin de ceinture du mont Royal

So getting back to my own exploration of the path yesterday evening, I started just below Beaver Lake, and began descending the path as it travels north-west along Côte-des-Neiges. It’s very wide, which is good because it’s supposed to be a shared-use path. And it’s still lined with surveying pegs and stretches of temporary construction fence here and there.

It’s also made of crushed stone for the time being, which is kind of like a larger, more jagged form of gravel.

I thought, as I was riding down the unfinished path, “Wow, this will be amazing once it’s paved!” Except when I got home and looked at the city documentation again, I realized they do not intend to pave it. In fact, it will be covered with poussière de pierre, or stone dust. And what is stone dust, you ask? It's this stuff.

I’m not usually an advocate for paving more green space, especially on Mount Royal, but I think in this case pavement would have been a better option. The City's press releases mention that the path is intended not only for pleasure riders, but also for commuters. I don't think commuters are going to appreciate the lack of traction uphill that you get with stone dust. It's also going to be pretty messy in the rain, even with fenders.

I suppose by using stone dust, the City ensures that cyclists will be riding slower, and will thus be less of a danger to pedestrians who will also be using the path (at least on the shared-use stretches). It will also keep away those pesky rollerbladers. And 10 more kilometres of unpaved bike path is better than nothing, isn't it?

But I’ll withhold my final judgment on the project until it’s complete. Let’s wait and see.

Bikes roulent, okay?

The smell of lilac blossoms is in the air, BIXI stands have sprung up everywhere, and all traces of snow have finally vanished from our (mostly) great city, including that 10-cm-thick wet blanket that dropped on us last week... but we won't talk about that. All of this means that biking season has at last begun in earnest in Montreal. Yes, many of us cycled all winter, apart from those few days when the weather was so miserable that only a serious masochist would consider getting on a bike. But for the next six months, biking will be more than a means of transportation: it will once more be a pleasure, at least on most days (and most routes).

So, with the return of cycling for fun, I've decided to launch a blog on cycling in Montreal. Or at least, a blog on cycling. I can't promise that all posts will be related to Montreal cycling; I may occasionally rant about cycling in general, or write about cycle touring in other locales. But if you like riding bikes for practical reasons as well as for fun, hopefully you'll find something of interest posted on here every once in a while.

Maybe once a week? I don't know, come back and find out.

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Links of interest:
City of Montreal's map of the bike path network
City of Montreal's map of the BIXI station network