Shanghai Bicycles

One Space For Cars, Twelve For Bikes

St. Viateur St. near Waverly

In just the past few years, Montreal has made some pretty big steps forward in developing its bike infrastructure. The new bike lane on Maisonneuve might have caused a crack in the street that threatened to pull the whole of downtown into a giant sinkhole, but it’s otherwise pretty snazzy. The counterflow bike lanes and sharrows in the McGill Ghetto are pretty cool. The new bike racks being installed on parking meters around town are a vast improvement over the old ones.

What I really like the most, though, are the seasonal bicycle parking lots installed on commercial streets in the Ville-Marie and Plateau Mont-Royal boroughs. In busy areas, like on Ste. Catherine St. near UQAM, in front of the Plateau library on Mount Royal Avenue, or next to the Mile End YMCA on Park Avenue, a car parking spot is removed and replaced with space for two-wheeled vehicles. It’s reminiscent of the approach taken in European cities like Paris, where entire blocks of parking space are given over to bikes and mopeds.

Each one of these bicycle parking areas is a reminder that at least a dozen bikes can fit into the space occupied by a single car. That’s twelve people arriving on two wheels instead of one or two arriving on four.

Ste. Catherine St. near St. Denis

Follow the Sharrows

A couple of days ago, Dale Duncan wrote on Spacing Toronto about sharrows, or shared road arrows, a new type of cycling-related road marking that is slowly becoming popular across North America. When I saw what they looked like — a bicycle symbol topped by two chevrons — I realized that Montreal has been using sharrows for a couple of years. The first time I saw them was in the McGill Ghetto, where in 2006, city workers painted them on Milton and Prince Arthur Sts., along with a couple of counterflow bike lanes.

As with any type of cycling infrastructure, cyclists are divided over the benefits and effectiveness of sharrows. Some criticize them for lulling cyclists into a false sense of security while doing little to remind drivers that they are legally bound to share the road with people on bikes. (The same argument is used against bike lanes, bike paths and just about every type of initiative that segregates cyclists and motorists.) Others, though, think they’re a good way to realign drivers and cyclists, getting bikes out of the dangerous “door zone” while reminding motorists that cyclists are present.

Sharrows, it seems to me, should be considered just one infrastructural tool among many. In the McGill Ghetto, a neighbourhood just east of the McGill University campus in downtown Montreal, they appear to work very well. Milton and Prince Arthur, parallel one-way streets heading in opposite directions, have long been used as the main east-west link from the Plateau Mont-Royal into the central part of downtown. As such, the number of bikes on these mostly residential streets is consistently high. (At 5pm on a Thursday last year, I counted 24 cyclists passing through the intersection of Milton and University in less than a minute.) Cyclists heading east from McGill have always rode against westbound traffic on Milton before switching over to eastbound Prince Arthur; cyclists heading west from the Plateau would ride against eastbound traffic on Prince Arthur before switching to westbound Milton.

Naturally, a large mass of cyclists heading against the traffic flow on these two streets was potentially dangerous for cyclists and motorists alike. For once, the city’s response was ingeniously simple: they established counterflow bike lanes on Milton for a few blocks east of McGill, using sharrows to direct cyclists towards Prince Arthur, where a normal bike lane took them east into the Plateau. Further east, at Prince Arthur and St. Laurent, another counterflow bike lane was built to lead cyclists to Clark Street, where sharrows direct them down to Milton Street.

So far, from what I have observed, the system is working. But that’s only because it is just that: a system. If the sharrows were used in isolation, without the bike lanes, I doubt they would be as successful. They also work because they are prominent — at intersections, four or five densely-packed sharrows are painted in succession, creating a clear path for bikes and making it impossible for drivers to ignore — and positioned in the centre of the road, rather than on the side where cyclists would be vulnerable to car doors.

Sharrows definitely have a place in our streets — but not in isolation and not as a replacement for bike lanes.

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Spiffy Bikes

Toronto seems to like its spiffy bikes. Even ignoring the number of people who seem to tool around on low-riders (including a crazy woman in Kensington Market who never seemed to dismount, even as she wobbled down Spadina Avenue, bumping into the sides of parked cars) there are a lot of cool-looking two-wheelers of various sorts. These aren’t necessarily expensive bikes; they’re just unusual and remarkable.

Now compare that to Montreal, where most people ride around on $40 pieces of junk they bought from some guy in a back alley. Maybe this is one of the rare cases in which Montrealers are more practical-minded than Torontonians. They are resigned to the high likelihood that their bike will one day be stolen, so why bother shelling out extra for something that looks nice? Still, if the scruffy homeless guy trying to pry loose a bicycle post with a large 2×4 is any indication, bike theft is just as common in Toronto as it is here.