Tuesday 11 December 2012

Wish List

In a shot from the city of Montreal's 2012 cycling map, I've marked three dead ends or missing links that make the top of my wish list for the city to take some action in the new year.


Number 1 is the dead end at the corner of Bellechasse and Boulevard Saint-Laurent, which causes so much frustration for cyclists and pedestrians. For cyclists heading downtown in the morning because they end up at a one way street heading north when they want to head south. And for pedestrians because the majority of the cyclists choose to ride on the sidewalk between Bellechase and Bernard until they can pick up the bike path on Clark.

Number 2 is the missing link between the corner of Esplanade and Mont Royal Avenue and the bike path on Rachel. This is probably the easiest one of the three to address as it merely requires a small widening of the path on the east side of Jeanne Mance Park in order to define a section for cyclists and a section for pedestrians.

Number 3 is the dead end at the intersection of Prince Arthur and Boulevard Saint-Laurent. It seems madness to define an on-road bike lane on Prince Arthur that leads cyclists to one of the busiest commercial streets in the city. Perhaps it was thought that the bike lane would continue on the pedestrian portion of Prince Arthur towards the north/south Berri bike path, but this has not been done so I am not quite sure what the idea is here. 

An option could be to make Clark Street cyclable from Bernard to Prince Arthur, but it would certainly meet with opposition in the narrow southern section that would require parking spaces to be removed. The city's map is somewhat misleading as it does not show streets where there is only one direction of travel for cyclists such as on Saint Urbain (southbound), which gives the impression that it is available to cyclists to go north on it. 

It is fine to ask cyclists to ride responsibly and respect the rules, but it also should be incumbent upon the people who design our urban infrastructure to provide a system that makes sense for the citizens that use it.

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