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...