Réseau cyclable montréalais - Discussion générale

Texte complet : New véloroute will link REM stations to bike network

New véloroute will link REM stations to bike network

Builders of the REM and the city will be putting together an intricate bike path linking TMR to Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue and Deux Montagnes.

Jason Magder • Montreal Gazette
Published Mar 04, 2024 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 4 minute read


Noël-Nord Park in Montreal’s Cartierville neighbourhood, next to the future REM. A bike path is being proposed that runs along the REM’s Deux-Montagnes and West Island branches. PHOTO BY DAVE SIDAWAY /Montreal Gazette

Cycling advocates say a planned bicycle network will become like a highway for cyclists and make it much more efficient to get around the island by bike.

The city is forging ahead with plans to build a so-called véloroute, to connect at least 15 of the stations on the eventual REM light-rail network and link to employment hubs and nature parks. The véloroute will span at least 38 kilometres of Montreal Island and link to Laval and as far as Deux-Montagnes. The network will link to existing bike paths as well as industrial parks and nature parks, like Cap St-Jacques, les Bois-de-l’Île Bizard and the future Grand parc de l’Ouest.

Construction is set to begin at the end of the year and will last until 2032.

The network will be built alongside the REM’s tracks on the two branches heading toward Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue and Deux-Montagnes, starting at Canora Station in Town of Mount Royal.

“We hope this will allow Montrealers to have new mobility options in the face of known congestion in the areas affected,” Sophie Mauzerolle, the executive committee member in charge of mobility, said in a written statement. “Stimulating active transport while rolling out this bike network will improve accessibility to 15 stations of the REM, improve access to employment hubs and decongestion in certain key areas all the while creating links to nature parks.”

Magali Bebronne, a program director at the cycling lobby group Vélo Québec, said the project could be a game changer for people who commute to work by bike. She said if it’s planned correctly, this will allow cyclists to access a huge swath of protected bike lanes that are separated from car traffic and uninterrupted by stop signs or traffic lights. Currently, there are very few spots where cyclists can travel significant distances separated from cars and without major interruptions from traffic signals. Among those the examples are a three-kilometre path at Des Carrières St. in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie and a 2.1-kilometre path at Souligny Ave. in Mercier—Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

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“It’s rare to have such long stretches that would be uninterrupted and allow people to travel long distances,” Bebronne said. “It also creates a redundancy, in the event that the (REM light-rail) system breaks down.”

She said the West Island is an area where it is especially difficult to commute by bicycle, and the network will make it easier not just for cyclists in the area to commute downtown but also within their local neighbourhoods. While the distance from the network’s extreme points to the downtown core are ambitious for most cyclists, Bebronne believes it would be a boon for those with electric bicycles.

Those who take the entire path will also be able to link to bike paths that would take them downtown or several other parts of the central city. The network would also allow cyclists to access the city’s métro network, as it would come close to the Côte-Vertu and Du Collège stations on the Orange Line.

The first hurdle to build the network was cleared in January when Montreal’s agglomeration council and the city of Montreal approved two borrowing bylaws worth more than $90 million. The money will be used to study the project, purchase the land necessary and build the network itself.

The provincial government will also contribute to the project, so the overall price tag isn’t yet known. Some of the project could also be subsidized by higher levels of government, according to the loan bylaw approved in council.

However, it is still not clear who will do the work, as much of the land is owned by CDPQ Infra, the infrastructure arm of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, which owns and operates the REM. The Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain is also involved in the planning.

The concept was first conceived in 2012 by the St-Laurent borough as a way of linking the then-Deux-Montagnes train tracks to the Bois-de-Liesse nature park. At the time, the borough asked the agglomeration to build a bike path alongside the entirety of the line. In 2016, a small 1.4-kilometre section of the path was built to link Toupin Blvd. to the Bois-Franc station as a test area.

“It was a part of an overall plan to have that type of biking infrastructure, but the arrival of the REM means that parts of the véloroute were put on hold because the CDPQ bought the Deux-Montagnes rail line,” said St-Laurent borough mayor Alan DeSousa. “They didn’t think it would be safe to have two construction sites at the same time.”

DeSousa welcomes the idea, even if his borough asked the agglomeration council to put this bike network together in 2012. He said the planning will be done over the next few months by elected representatives from the boroughs and cities along the route.

“It will take some co-ordination to make sure the trajectory works for the interests of their residents,” DeSousa said. “We need to make sure there is a coherency there.

“I think the benefit of this is to do it as much as possible within the corridor, with as few impediments as possible so those who use it can fly without having to do the stop-and-go that you normally encounter in city traffic.”

DeSousa said he’s optimistic that the project will get off the ground as planned, saying there is a lot of political will to make it happen, and because the work on the tracks has been completed by the REM’s builders.

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Extremely similar to the one @jacouzi had shared here

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Enfin une piste cyclable qui passe par TMR! Mais pas sur l’espace public de TMR.

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8 messages ont été fusionnés à un sujet existant : Avenue Christophe-Colomb - Aménagenent de voies cyclables

Une entrevue radio d’Alan DeSousa, maire de Saint-Laurent, à l’émission Le 15-18 pour parler de la véloroute

:radio: :headphones: Une véloroute qui suit le long du REM d’ici 2032 : Entrevue avec Alan DeSousa Rattrapage du 4 mars 2024 : L’augmentation des cas de rougeole, et un skieur de 97 ans

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Un article dans le Business Insider sur les répercussions positives des voies cyclables sur l’économie/commerce

Texte complet : Bike lanes are good for business

Bike lanes are good for business

Study after study proves it. So why do so many shops and restaurants still oppose better streets?

Pete Ryan for BI
Mar 7, 2024, 6:48 AM GMT-5

Businesses hate bike lanes. Sure, they reduce pollution, slow the pace of climate change, cut traffic fatalities, and make cities healthier and more pleasant. But they also take away parking spaces, which makes it tougher for shoppers to load up their cars with piles of stuff. Freaked-out business owners have been fighting bike lanes coast to coast, in cities from San Diego to Cambridge, Massachusetts. They worry — not unreasonably — that anything that makes it harder for customers to get to their stops will eat into their already precarious margins.

“As someone whose family had a small business when I was growing up, I know how invested you get in it,” says Joseph Poirier, a senior researcher at the urban-planning consultancy Nelson Nygaard. “It’s your whole life. Anything you think could threaten that, even if the government and their consultants tell you it’s not going to be a problem, is very scary. It makes sense.”

It’s also wrong. Four decades’ worth of research proves it. I know this because I’ve read every study and report I could find that looked specifically at the economics of bike lanes since 1984 — 32 research articles, to be exact. The results show that making streets friendlier for bikes — and sidewalks friendlier for pedestrians — is actually good for business. The rise of “complete streets” and “road diets,” as urban planners call them, has been a huge boon to businesses in cities.

I won’t walk you through every study, because most of them actually use survey data. Do you think bike lanes discourage shopping? How much do you spend when you ride your bike here? Surveys aren’t the most reliable way to look at this question. People lie, they misremember, they get stuff wrong. And anecdotal experience tends to loom too large. One angry customer who complains about not being able to find parking trumps the 10 who rode their bikes to your shop and didn’t say boo.

More confoundingly, survey after survey has shown that business owners overestimate how many of their customers drive to their stores, versus walking or biking. In a study of the effects of street improvements on a shopping corridor in Los Angeles published in 2012, more than half of the store owners on the bike-laned part of the boulevard thought most of their customers drove. The actual number was 15%.

So what we need is financial data. Revenue numbers. Sales taxes. Credit-card receipts. Employment figures. That’s the good stuff. And for methodological rigor, we want to case-match our study areas to similar neighborhoods that didn’t get bike lanes — and to numbers for the city overall, to establish a baseline.

That cuts the number of useful studies to just about half a dozen. Here, in brief, is what they tell us.

In 2013, a researcher at the University of Washington named Kyle Rowe looked at two shopping districts in Seattle that got put on road diets. Rowe compared sales taxes in these “Neighborhood Business Districts” with those in similar districts in the city that didn’t get bike lanes. In one NBD, which replaced car lanes and three parking spots with two bike lanes, sales closely tracked those in the bike-less areas, both in peaks and troughs. Conclusion: Bike lanes did nothing to reduce business. And in the other NBD, which replaced 12 parking spaces with a bike lane, sales quadrupled.

Was the spike in business because more cyclists came to shop? Rowe, a careful researcher, declines to make that leap. “It would be logical to assume that more bicyclists were coming to the NBD because of the new facility,” he writes, “but no conclusion can be made to connect mode choice to economic performance.” Still, there’s no mistaking the data: Adding bike lanes certainly didn’t hurt sales — and may have boosted them dramatically.

A year later, the New York City Department of Transportation conducted the same kind of study on a larger scale, examining sales-tax data in seven retail-heavy neighborhoods. A few were plaza-type hubs; the others were more linear retail corridors. All had been through the kind of extensive changes to pedestrian access, mass transit, traffic calming, landscaping, and bike paths that New York was pushing at the time. The results were striking. Compared with the overall business climate in each borough, sales in the bike-friendly areas soared by 84 percentage points in Brooklyn, 9 percentage points in Manhattan, and 32 percentage points in the Bronx. “Better streets,” the report concludes, “provide benefits to businesses in all types of neighborhoods,” from “lower-income neighborhoods with ‘mom & pop’ retail” to “glitzier areas with sky-high rents.”

The next couple of studies got even more specific. In 2018, Joseph Poirier, the urban planner I quoted earlier, looked at sales data from three retail neighborhoods in San Francisco with newly installed bike lanes. Drawing on everything from industry coding conventions to map data, he was able to draw detailed distinctions among hundreds of businesses: what they sold (retail versus restaurants), where they were located (right next to a bike lane versus a few blocks away), and who their customers were (coffee shops serving locals, say, versus a furniture store serving the entire city).

The results were mixed. In two of the three districts, shops and restaurants serving locals did way better than places serving a wider area. In the other district, sales tanked relative to the number of people a shop employed, suggesting that bike lanes gave an advantage to smaller businesses. “The takeaway is that it’s probably a minimal effect on businesses when you put in a bike lane,” Poirer says. “That actually makes a lot of sense. If you think of a busy downtown district, there’s not that many parking spaces relative to the number of people who come to the business.” In this case, bike lanes didn’t seem to help businesses much. But overall, it didn’t hurt them.

In 2019 Poirer was on a team that did another study of San Francisco. They looked at businesses directly adjacent to two kinds of bike infrastructure — Class II, which creates dedicated bike lanes denoted by a paint stripe, and Class III, where signs instruct cars and bikes to share the street. (Either way, blocks with the new lanes lost an average of three parking spaces.) Once again, the results were mixed. On Class II lanes, bars and barber shops and banks enjoyed increases in sales, while furniture stores and gas stations were more likely to experience decreases. Older businesses tended to decline more than new ones. Overall, in the year after the bike infrastructure went in, businesses on Class II streets lost a median of $27,921 compared with $19,390 for those on Class III lanes. But similar shops that weren’t on a bike lane lost $25,296. When it came to bike lanes, there were lots and lots of winners. But there were some losers, too.

The most definitive study, to my eye, came in 2020. Jenny Liu and Wei Shi, researchers at Portland State University in Oregon produced a 260-page report looking at neighborhoods that got bike lanes and other street improvements in Portland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Memphis. The team cross-referenced financial information like sales taxes with geographic data, so they could tell exactly where businesses were in relation to the street improvements. They ran three kinds of econometric analyses on each site. And they looked not only at revenue but also at the number of employees — per business and in total — in each study area. “I was really trying to be rigorous methodologically, to provide the kind of evidence that people can use to talk to their communities,” says Liu, the director of the Center for Urban Studies at Portland State.


Bike lanes don’t hurt the shops next to them. They usually help bring in customers.
Boston Globe

Like Poirier, Liu and Shi found that in many cases, only certain kinds of businesses benefited from the bike lanes and street improvements. Food and beverage did better; retail did worse. And just slapping a bike lane on a hectic thoroughfare didn’t do anyone any good. “On really large streets with high traffic volumes or speeds, even if you add a bike lane or pedestrian improvements, it still isn’t really inviting,” Liu says. “Just having street calming doesn’t always have positive results.”

But overall, Liu’s team found, retail areas benefited from better streets. Sometimes nothing changed, but more often the areas near bike lanes wound up with more employees and more revenue. That was true in Portland, at two sites in San Francisco, one site in Minneapolis (at the other, retail did better than food), and one site in Memphis (at the other, food did a bit better than retail). Across the country, again and again, the numbers told the same story: Either “business activity remained pretty much constant,” Liu says, or “certain types of businesses became much more prosperous.”

Back in the 1960s, when the advent of suburban flight and climate-controlled malls began to draw business away from America’s once thriving downtowns, cities tried to stanch the flow by banning cars on shopping streets. It was called, not exactly trippingly, “pedestrianization,” and it was a disaster. Pedestrian-only plazas couldn’t compete with the Golden Age of the Automobile, and many downtowns turned into boarded-up wastelands. That extinction event is still encoded in the genetic memories of today’s retailers and restaurateurs.

But things have changed. Nowadays, online retail is crushing brick-and-mortar worse than any half-assed pedestrian plaza ever could. What’s more, demand for new homes means lots of cities are putting them downtown, trading daytime workers for all-the-time residents close enough to ride a bike. COVID showed us it’s worth giving up parking spaces for outdoor restaurants. America’s cities are undergoing nothing short of a total rethink of what and whom downtowns are for.


You can pack way more bikes than cars into a small space — and that means way more shoppers.
UCG/Getty Images

Nationwide numbers of bike lanes are tough to come by. By one count, there are nearly 20,000 miles of bike-ready paths in the United States, but that includes rural routes and trails. Still, city after city is working to create European-style streets. Portland has over 430 miles of bike lanes, about the same as Chicago; New York City has more than 1,500; Los Angeles has added almost 1,000 miles since 2010. And every new mile of bike lane per square mile of city increases the number of cyclists by 1%. The training wheels are about to come off the “complete street” movement.

Now, advocates and policymakers should be honest about all this. Even if bike lanes boost revenues and employment overall, some individual businesses are going to win and some are going to lose. An older business selling heavier goods, or drawing from a wider watershed for its customer base, might well be in trouble. “Newer businesses who are thrilled with density and development around them are pivoting to a customer who’s younger, who’s arriving on a scooter or a bike,” says Larisa Ortiz, a managing director at the urban-planning consultancy Streetsense. “But this process of evolution toward bike lanes and mobility does not come without loss.”

One way I’d propose to help businesses adjust to the total remaking of the urban landscape is the most American solution of all: Just hand them some money. All you’d have to do is build funds into the budgets for street-improvement projects to compensate adjacent businesses for any sales they wind up losing. If your business takes a hit from all the bikes, you get a pay-out.

The most effective way to deal with opposition from local businesses is to just get the bike lanes built. Before-and-after surveys tend to show that in the long run, everyone winds up satisfied. “It’s a political question, and oftentimes it’s a very divided community when it comes to these types of projects,” Poirier says. “But once a street is changed, generally speaking, after six months or a year, nobody remembers what it used to look like. It’s the new normal.” All the data in the world may prove that bike lanes are good for business. But nothing beats experiencing them.

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Le doublon sur De la Commune a été corrigé.

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10 messages ont été fusionnés à un sujet existant : Nouvelle paserrelle reliant Rivière-des-Prairies à Laval

Je sais pas dans quel sujet ça va, mais cette caricature de The Onion m’a bien fait rire

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Un message a été fusionné à un sujet existant : Sécurisation de la rue De Verdun

31 messages ont été fusionnés à un sujet existant : Sécurisation de la rue De Verdun

2 messages ont été fusionnés à un sujet existant : REV AXE 2 - Viger / Saint-Antoine / Saint-Jacques

Un message a été fusionné à un sujet existant : Axe Jean-Talon

Le symbole du losange n’est-il pas explicitement pour les voies réservées au transport collectif? Les rendus les placent dans le REV.

Les losanges sont pour les voies réservées, peu importe le mode dès que c’est sur la rue et que ce n’est pas pour l’auto solo.

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Skyline de Toronto en background. Ça dort à la ville :rofl:

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What possibly could be done on rue Ottawa and rue William, at least temporarily to prevent vehicles from parking/standing in the bike lanes, is using low steel hoop barrier. These are used in parking lots generally but could possibly used on the streets, prevents cars from pulling into the bike lanes

It would be similar to the parking blocks used on some bike paths, but be slightly higher and more integrated with the design of the street, here’s a render I made of it using the same steel they use for the sidewalks:
96e5409f3140b8d08be8aca2064fd4f561468679

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Can these be covered with snow in winter? Personally i prefer paris style

IMG_4467

Also the cycling path is large so can still enter from the intersection so we also need one very visible pole in the middle of the path

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L’enjeu principal des bollards ou des barrières physiques réside effectivement dans les opérations de déneigement. Ce n’est pas pour rien que la Ville retire près de la moitié de ses bollards à l’automne.

Les bollards “permanents”, comme ceux que vous proposez, sont solidement ancrés dans le sol. Si un appareil d’entretien les accroche, ça nécessite la réfection d’une partie du trottoir. En revanche, les bollards flexibles peuvent être remplacés le jour même… mais ils sont incroyablement laids.

Il me semble que la Ville et Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie avait ou voulait tenter l’expérience de bordure de béton sur Christophe-Colomb et le REV Bellechasse.

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That would be a major tripping hazard in winter and also get destroyed by snow scappers.

La solution que j’ai vue et qui ressemble un peu à ça, c’est d’utiliser des petites bordures en granite comme sur Pierre-de-Coubertin.

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