Here are some phone snaps taken while cycling around town over the past couple of months. These were all taken in a relatively small area around the Plateau and Rosemont.
Laurier/Saint-Denis – already a busy cycling intersection, now that the REV St-Denis is open it will get even busier.
Bellechasse – a somewhat controversial branch of the REV because it removed most street parking in order to create two uni-directional bike paths. You can see one of the electric Bixi bikes here.
The REV St-Denis was completed a few weeks ago and it is already quite busy, although there is still some signage and road markings that are missing.
Laurier Street East is one-way for vehicular traffic but two-way for bikes.
Laurier West only has painted bike lanes, but it's wide enough that cars always give you lots of room and the lanes aren't in the dooring zone.
This is leading up to the protected bike path that runs along St-Laurent underneath the CPR tracks. The railway is a big barrier to north-south travel and the underpasses that run beneath it were always very dangerous for cyclists. The St-Laurent path was built in 2014 and it has been a huge success with more than 10,000 bike trips on peak days. It's already showing its age, though, because the signalling and intersection design on both ends are completely inadequate.
This is the corner of Park and Bernard which has a lot of bike traffic, as well as a lot of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, but absolutely no bike infrastructure. It can get a little hairy.
Most of Montreal's bike infrastructure still consists of painted lanes, which aren't ideal, but over the past couple of years the city has been adding these bollards to keep drivers from straying into them. Better than nothing I guess.
Here's Rachel at St-Laurent, one of the original 80s bike paths. It was originally seasonal and protected only by bollards, but around 2014 the city built concrete medians to separate it from traffic. They're planted along much of the length which has added a lot of trees and greenery to Rachel, which was previously very denuded.
There are so many cyclists in Montreal who ride at night with absolutely no lights, which pisses me off to no end. Now that it's getting dark at 4pm I have a three-light setup: a blinking red light at the back, a blinking white light at the front, and another light pointed down and to the left which helps make you even more visible to passing drivers.
Finally, here's my ride. It's a simple three-speed city bike with an internal gear hub and some folding baskets I installed on the back, which are ugly but very practical for hauling groceries and beer home.
