I think that part of it is how we design our cycling infrastructure. In the south, if makes sense to have a divider between the street and the cycling path since they don’t really have to worry about snow. Over here, we really should just reduce obstacles to a bare minimum so that we can clear the street and the cycling path as easily as possible.
I live in Sherbrooke right now. The sidewalks on the south side of Wellington are almost at the same level as the street and I think that’s a solution that we should adopt much more widely. There’s just enough slope to direct the water away from the sidewalk and that’s all that is really needed. Sherbrooke has a series of heavy concrete planters that they move around to narrow the street during summer to create more space for pedestrians and cyclists. During winter, they can just move them out of the way which makes snow clearing really easy. They’ve also got mobile decorative steel fences with a concrete base. Mobile infrastructure is the way to go. Permanent infrastructure just adds complexity, time and cost to snow clearing operations.
Another thing that we should do is rely less on painted lines. I don’t know how long they take in Montreal to repaint the lines every summer, but in Sherbrooke, they often aren’t even done by the time September rolls around. Those lines end up getting scrapped off the street just months later with the first snow. It is ridiculous. Overhead signalisation panels or on the side of the street would do a far better job without the need to constantly replace them. Alternatively, we could use stones of a different color instead of markings to delimitate the street.
St-Catherine already makes use of a lot of those ideas and I think it is a great start for what could be a model for how all urbain streets should be built in Québec. It is great to look for solutions elsewhere, but we do need to adapt them to our climate.