Montreal’s Mayor Reclaims a Famous Road From Cars and Trucks

Once a yr, members of the skilled biking elite journey to Montreal to battle each other on a notoriously robust circuit outlined by a number of ascents up Mount Royal on Camillien-Houde Way. Soon the street will completely be the area of cyclists — and pedestrians — of all skills, as a part of an bold program by the town’s mayor, Valérie Plante, to get individuals out of vehicles.

Under Ms. Plante’s management, Montreal is constructing a status for efficiently selling biking as transportation, not simply sport or recreation. This week, she introduced that Camillien-Houde Way would now not be a busy and handy shortcut for motorists within the metropolis’s downtown.

It’s the newest of Ms. Plante’s strikes to defy motorists offended over measures favoring cyclists and pedestrians, a stance that units her aside from another big-city politicians in Canada.

Ms. Plante mentioned within the announcement that the street, which at present resembles a freeway lined with concrete and metal boundaries, might be completely closed to vehicles and vans. In its place might be a gravel pedestrian path, just like the others that snake by Mount Royal Park, and a paved biking street giant sufficient to accommodate the bike race in addition to emergency automobiles. More timber, new landscaping and a brand new lookout can even be launched.

“Olmsted, who created the park, was totally against having cars in it,” Ms. Plante instructed me, referring to Frederick Law Olmsted, the panorama architect who additionally designed Central Park in New York and who died earlier than vehicles got here to dominance. “The city used to belong to cars only, and now we’re just kind of rebalancing the whole thing.”

The announcement got here days after the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal, which was gained on Sunday by Adam Yates, a British rider who’s at present ranked eighth by the International Cycling Union. Yates made his successful transfer on the defining characteristic of the race circuit: the taxing climb up Camillien-Houde Way. Riders should make the ascent 18 instances within the race, which has a complete elevation acquire of 4,842 meters.

The race and its sibling occasion in Quebec City are the one two North American occasions in biking’s WorldTour, which incorporates the Tour de France. In 2026, Montreal will host biking’s world championships on a variation of the Grand Prix circuit together with the revised Camillien-Houde Way; the town beforehand hosted the 1974 championships and the 1976 Olympics.

Since changing into mayor in 2017, Ms. Plante has launched a flurry of biking measures, together with a 184-kilometer community of motorbike paths on primary arteries, with curbs and medians bodily separating cyclists from motor site visitors. Last fall, the town introduced plans to add 200 kilometers to the so-called categorical bike community.

On prime of that, Ms. Plante’s administration closes 10 streets to motor automobiles every summer time.

When the bike community enlargement was introduced late final yr, the town estimated that biking had risen by about 20 p.c in 2021. Even on days with lower than supreme climate, cyclists are a notable presence downtown.

Other politicians in Canada have taken a distinct method. Vancouver lately eliminated a lot of the bike lanes that have been added to Stanley Park throughout the pandemic. Ottawa’s new mayor, Mark Sutcliffe, got here to energy partly by campaigning in opposition to the price of his primary opponent’s plan to enhance the capital’s biking infrastructure. And this summer time, Mr. Sutcliffe went on a campaign in opposition to the National Capital Commission’s determination to shut a parkway alongside the Rideau Canal to automobiles. In each instances, the actions gave the impression to be in response to complaints from some drivers.

Of course, Montreal additionally has a robust motoring tradition. The metropolis’s greatest annual occasion is a Formula 1 race, and enormous luxurious automotive dealerships line the perpetually busy expressways.

Ms. Plante acknowledged that her biking and strolling plans had not been embraced by all drivers.

“There was a bit of resistance at the beginning because people didn’t know what to expect and they were scared,” she mentioned. “But for me, everything we put forward is about answering the climate change crisis that we are going through. People wanted politicians to take action.”

She added that she believes the tasks, coupled with tree plantings, have improved the standard of life in neighborhoods by making streets safer. (The plans to shut Camillien-Houde Way, she mentioned, have been prompted by the dying of an 18-year-old racing bicycle owner, Clément Ouimet, in a crash with a motorist making an unlawful U-turn.) Nevertheless, Ms. Plante acknowledged that some motorists consider bike and pedestrian measures have worsened the town’s site visitors congestion.

“I’m asking a lot of them to change their habits, and that’s not always easy,” she mentioned of drivers, including, “Depending on public transport options, it’s not always possible for them.”

“But the fact is that it’s not the bike lanes that create traffic in Montreal,” she continued. “It’s the fact that the number of cars have doubled in the last five years in the Montreal metropolitan area. People buy more cars — a second, a third, a fourth car. That’s the issue.”

She added: “I know it can be frustrating. People are used to having more space for their cars in the city. But it’s not a bike lane that is responsible for that.”

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A local of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the previous 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

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