August 2nd, 2010
The following essay appears in the August 2010 issue of Muse, a Hong Kong arts and culture magazine.
I still remember bicycling up Mount Royal. It was a warm summer night and there were five of us riding through the streets of Montreal, looking for something to do. Somebody suggested heading up the mountain that rises like a crouching giant from the middle of the city. The path uphill was surprisingly level but completely dark. Our eyes rendered useless, we relied on our other senses to guide us forward, listening to the gravel under our tires, the wind in the trees. The air smelled damp and earthy. I looked up at the treetops silhouetted against the bright city sky.
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July 25th, 2010
On an abandoned stretch of road in Sai Kung, a row of lumpy objects covered by a blue-and-white tarp looks alarmingly like a pile of bodies. A closer investigation reveals a graveyard of a different sort: hundreds of bicycles confiscated by the government.
Last year, 10,846 bicycles were removed from sidewalk railings, lampposts and other government-owned property. Illegal bicycle parking is such a problem in the New Territories and Islands District that the Home Affairs Department has issued a television announcement urging cyclists to only park their bicycles in designated parking areas.
That might be harder than it sounds. A study completed last year for the Sha Tin District Council revealed that there are just 10,617 legal parking spots for the district’s 150,000 bikes. The same shortage of legal bicycle parking spaces is replicated throughout the city.
Every month, Legco member Albert Chan Wai-yip receives hundreds of complaints about bicycle parking from his constituents in New Territories West.
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June 27th, 2010
Martin Turner has a way of getting to work that is faster than the MTR and much cheaper than a taxi: he rides a bike. For most of his ten years working at a marketing firm in Wan Chai, Turner has commuted from his North Point home by bicycle. “It takes about 15 minutes door to door,” he said. “That’s about half the time it would take by public transport.”
Across the harbour, Charlie Wong Liang-yih works as a graphic designer from his home in Mongkok. When he leaves his flat to visit friends in other parts of Kowloon, he often takes his bike. “Before, people thought it was ridiculous to ride a bicycle around Hong Kong, but more and more people use them to get around,” he said.
People in dozens of neighbourhoods across Hong Kong use bicycles to commute to train stations, work and to run daily errands, but the government officially recognizes cycling only as a form of recreation, not as transport — something cycling activists are fighting to change.
Every day, according to a 2004 Transport Department study on cycling, more than 65,000 bicycle trips are made, mainly by people biking from their homes to train stations, schools, workplaces and shops.
Other studies suggest the number of daily bike trips is actually much higher. Last year, the Shatin District Council commissioned a study on cycling in the district, which is home to more than 600,000 people, and found that 33.5 percent of the population cycles more than once a week. The study also reported that 65 percent of residents perceive cycling as “an important mode of transport” and that each Shatin family owns, on average, about two bicycles.
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July 22nd, 2009
Photo by cagliostro
The launch of Bixi, Montreal’s new bike-sharing system, has been nothing short of spectacular. Despite early problems — faulty lock mechanisms have led to the theft of dozens of bikes — it has been more successful than anyone imagined. In fact, Montrealers have taken so well to Bixi that Stationnement de Montréal, the municipal agency that runs the system, has decided to bump up an expansion that wasn’t planned until next year. Next month, an additional 2,000 bikes will be added at 100 new stations in Villeray, Little Burgundy and Côte des Neiges.
Just as the public has quickly taken to Bixi, the bike-sharing service has already engrained itself in the city. “Bixi has truly changed the urban landscape here,” notes On Two Wheels, the Gazette’s cycling blog. “There is a new, yet already familiar ‘blink’ on the bike paths; downtown it seems like every third bike is a Bixi. This program is clearly doing some heavy lifting toward getting more people using bikes that might not have otherwise.”
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January 19th, 2009
En arrivant pour la première fois à Karlsruhe, en Allemagne, j’ai été surprise par le nombre de bicyclettes aux alentours de la gare centrale. Il faut dire qu’avec ses 65 millions de cyclistes, l’Allemagne – et ses villes – se doivent d’être adaptés aux vélos. Et la majorité des villes le sont ; Karlsruhe est une des ces villes adaptées aux bicyclettes, ce qui, concrétement, ce traduit par des facilités pour les cyclistes : pistes cyclables et parkings à vélos.
Parking à vélos à côté de chez un coiffeur
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November 20th, 2008
The City of Montreal recently began its annual operation of removing on-street bike racks. This year, it seems that they have been particularly bad about putting up warning signs on the bike racks and many people have had their bicycles removed together along with the bike rack that it was attached to. One new resident of Montreal called in to one of the local radio programs to complain about just such an incident at a Mile End bike parking site.
This news item generated a few lively responses which demonstrate the range of emotions around bicycles. On voice mail…
I live in Mile End. On Saturday I was standing on my balcony and I saw a black pick-up truck, with no markings on it, towing a trailer taking away bike racks and throwing entire bike racks, with the bikes attached, into the back of the pickup truck and into the trailer. Now the funny part, and maybe it’s not so funny, was that just moments prior to that I saw people locking their bikes to the bike rack and going into the cafe and coming back and their bikes being gone. You know, there is no respect for bicycles. Bicycles are not toys. Bicycles aren’t just somebody’s hobby. People actually use them for transportation, and I don’t think that Helen Fotopulos [the borough, who is also on Montreal's executive committee for urban planning] or anybody else at City Hall realizes that.
And by text message…
That bike story — WOW, that’s hard-hitting news. For a small town! What’s next? Little Billy from Dorval got a scout’s badge?
May 16th, 2008
Increasingly, parking your bike in busy areas like the Plateau is almost as hard as parking a car. This summer, though, the Plateau Mont-Royal borough will be leading the way in giving cyclists more places to rest their two-wheelers. By the time autumn arrives later this year, the Plateau’s 1,500 parking spots will have doubled to more than 3,000.
“The Plateau is the single area with the most cyclists in all of North America. Seven per cent of all movements are made by bike. That’s a lot, but we don’t have enough places for everyone to park their bike,” says Michel Labrecque, city councillor for Mile-End and the man in charge of the Plateau’s new Plan de déplacement urbain, which will guide the borough’s approach to transportation over the next few years.
A big part of that approach is to give priority to “active” modes of transportation like cycling and walking. So far, one way of doing that has been to replace parking spots for cars with on-street bicycle parking areas, several of which have already been implemented on busy retail streets like St-Viateur, Laurier and Mont-Royal, as well as in front of schools, daycares, housing co-ops and the Maison des cyclistes on Rachel.
“When we take away a parking spot, some people think of it as ‘their’ parking space and they might get angry. But that’s what it takes to make a change in the modal split, the way people get around. We can put between five and eight bikes in the amount of space that a single car would occupy,” says Labrecque. “We installed one next to the YMCA because it’s always full of bikes. There’s one on Laurier near Laurier Park, in front of a Metro supermarket, and it’s always full too, so it might be enlarged this year.”
While the on-street parking areas that currently exist can accommodate about 160 bikes, the Plateau plans to add four to six new areas this summer, with room for an additional 56 bikes. This doesn’t include the 14 parking areas, with space for 175 bikes, that will be built on the newly renovated St-Laurent, or the expanded parking area in front of the Plateau library and Maison de la culture, on Mont-Royal, which will be made permanent this year.
Each on-street parking area costs between $4,000 and $6,000 to install, but it’s well worth it, says Michel Tanguy, a Plateau borough spokesman. “The borough has really taken off in a direction that will see the number of spaces for bikes do nothing but increase.”
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October 17th, 2007
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
