The head of a cycling advocacy group says Montreal’s public transit strike has spurred record numbers on the city’s bike paths.
Jean-François Rheault, CEO of Vélo Québec, says devices installed by the city to count the number of passing bicycles are showing record or near-record levels since the strike began Monday.
“Nobody wanted this strike,” he said. “But that being said, what we see is that cycling is a solution which is used by Montrealers to get around.”
The strike by 2,400 transit maintenance workers has limited bus and metro service to morning and afternoon rush hours and late at night. Partial daylong service will resume Thursday, with some level of service disruptions expected until June 17, with the exception of the upcoming Canadian Grand Prix weekend.
Rheault says one bicycle counter on the corner of St-Denis and Rachel streets in the Plateau-Mont-Royal district recorded more than 11,000 trips on Tuesday for the first time since it was installed in 2020, despite a day that included rain and a severe thunderstorm warning.
He says some bicycle paths are so crowded that riders are having to wait for more than one traffic light cycle to cross the street.
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“We’ve had several reports from people saying that there were a lot of people on the paths, and it’s not necessarily very comfortable,” he said. “We’re reaching situations of overcrowding, which actually translates to the fact that not all cyclists are able to cross at a light.”
Information from several dozen bicycle counters around the city recorded 92,871 trips in total on Monday, compared to 80,961 the week before. Tuesday, with rainy weather, recorded fewer rides than the previous week.
Although there were no citywide records broken, the data appeared to show spikes in traffic at a few key spots in the city.
In addition to the 11,044 trips at Rachel street on Tuesday, the St-Denis/Des Carrières intersection saw 10,228 trips and the Berri/Banq counter reported 7,421.
Christian Vermette, the chief executive officer of BIXI Montréal, a service that offers bike rentals and docking stations for short trips, says it added extra capacity to meet the demand just in time for the “busiest day in its history” on Tuesday.
“We experienced exceptional ridership this week, with a 35 per cent increase in trips this Monday compared to historical figures and a record 83,897 trips on Tuesday,” Vermette said in an email.
While day-to-day numbers can vary due to weather, Rheault said the number of people on Montreal’s bicycle paths has been steadily rising in recent years. That growth has been driven by several factors, including a rise in winter cycling and the expansion and popularity of BIXI.
Last year, the city’s express bicycle path network, called the REV, reported about 1.6 million trips, which was about 100,000 more than the year before, he said.
Rheault said the strike is a “tragedy” for people with limited mobility, but there could be a silver lining.
He said events such as the 2019 Paris transit strike and the 2012 flooding of New York’s subway system during Hurricane Sandy served as “turning points” that led to a permanent increase in bike ridership, after people who were forced to turn to cycling out of necessity ended up sticking with it.
He said the same thing could happen in Montreal.
“For people getting around on a bike for the first time, I think for them it will be an experience of discovery,” he said. “…Maybe they’ll adopt it, maybe they’ll adopt it sometimes, maybe they’ll never come back, but in any case, these situations where we’re forced to review our mobility options don’t happen often in life.”
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