How To Build a Bike Lane that Breaks Records

It sounds funny to say, but this bike lane was a big influence on this channel. When we first moved to Montreal in 2019 we lived nearby and saw the city take Saint-Denis Street, a six lane road that we would never consider biking on, and turn it into the busiest bike corridor in the city under the concept of an “express bike network” (REV in French) that includes a few other routes right now and will include many more routes in the future. The Saint Denis express bike corridor was a big lesson in “if you build it, they will come”, and the number of cyclists has only been climbing.

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References:

Montreal bike counter data: https://data.eco-counter.com/ParcPublic/?id=630
Vision vélo 2023-27: https://portail-m4s.s3.montreal.ca/pdf/carte_et_liste_des_projets_annonces_-_vision_velo_2023-2027.pdf

It sounds funny to say, but this bike lane was a big influence on this channel. When we first moved to Montreal in 2019 we lived nearby and saw the city take Saint-Denis Street, a six lane road that we would never consider biking on, and turn it into the busiest

Bike corridor in the city under the concept of an “express bike network” (REV in French) that includes a few other routes right now and will include many more routes in the future. The Saint Denis express bike corridor was a big lesson in “if you build it, they will

Come”, and the number of cyclists has only been climbing. The first year it was open, it saw 1.1 million trips. The next year, 1.3 million. In the third year, which just ended, this corridor saw 1.5 million trips, another big increase.

Breaking it down by month, here’s year 1, year 2, and finally year 3. Winter cycling isn’t quite mainstream yet, but every month is on an upward trend and January and February have the biggest volume increases over time. Winter cycling isn’t quite mainstream yet, but every season is on an upward trend and

Winter actually saw the biggest percentage jump from the first to the third year. So what explains the success of this bike corridor, and how can your city replicate it? First, the micro level: the design of the bike lane.

Everyone knows the gold standard for a bike lane is concrete protection from cars or even full separation from the road surface, but this route doesn’t actually have that. There’s concrete at intersections and underpasses but most of the route isn’t technically “protected” in the sense that cycling advocates usually ask for.

Despite that, it still feels really comfortable and obviously it’s been a big success. How can that work? One critical detail is that the bike lane is to the right of the parked cars, adjacent to the sidewalk, instead of to the left between parked cars and traffic like the standard

North American painted bike lane. A parking lane is about two and a half metres (or 8 feet) wide, and having that extra distance between you and car traffic — plus the mass of the actual parked cars — makes a huge difference without requiring pouring concrete on the road.

With that said, more protection or differentiation for the bike lane is still good, and from what we understand the long-term plan is to turn Saint-Denis into something more like these Danish-style bike lanes. Saint-Denis is also wide, closer to the width of a car lane than a standard North American painted bike lane.

Further down the route it gets even wider. Wide bike lanes make it easier to pass or to ride alongside people and talk to them while cycling, and it means that you have more room to avoid conflicts like passenger-side doors or people moving between the sidewalk and their parked cars.

Wide lanes also give a lot more breathing room to handle snowfall in the winter. Alongside the width, we have the fact that the Saint-Denis corridor is two one-way bike lanes on each side of the road, in the same direction as traffic.

Montreal used to build a lot of two-way bike lanes but now it tries to build one-way when possible, especially on busier streets. They’re more natural at intersections and do a better job of handling high volumes of cyclists. One level above the lane is the design of the route.

The Saint-Denis bike corridor is long and direct, covering 11 kilometres or 7 miles from one end of the island to the other, if we include the older bike lane down here. The distance makes it very useful, connecting lots of neighbourhoods and destinations.

Shorter corridors or connections can be useful too, but longer crosstown routes have bigger potential to be game changers. Think of it like subways or even highways. The most important and useful ones cover lots of distance and connect lots of things.

We’d probably even say that one 10 kilometre bike corridor is better than five separate two-kilometre routes, at least for a city this size. The Saint-Denis bike corridor is also on a main street that goes through the middle of lots of different neighbourhoods, at least for most of the route.

That compares to another approach of putting bike routes on side streets, which is definitely better than no bike route at all, but they become a bit less useful and much less visible like that. Maybe worst of all, side street bike routes are often indirect with lots of twists and turns.

The simplicity of going straight down the middle of lots of different neighbourhoods is really hard to beat. The next level above the route is the network. Bike lanes don’t succeed on their own any more than subways or highways do. Imagine if you had subway lines or highways that didn’t connect to anything.

Transportation works when it’s a network. In this case, the success of Saint-Denis relies on the fact that it connects to about a dozen other different bike routes and acts as a spine for the whole system. Some of the connecting lanes are older corridors with older designs but others are newer ones

Designed with the same principles as Saint-Denis, like wide lanes and direct routes. One good example is Bellechasse Street, transformed a few years ago from a not-so-great standard North American painted bike route — with narrow painted lanes between parked cars and

Traffic — to much wider bike lanes with one lane of parking and one lane of traffic. This is still a “painted bike lane” but it’s now a much better painted bike lane with more room for cyclists and fewer cars to worry about.

Bellechasse recorded about 900,000 cyclists last year at this spot and 450,000 here, and the successes of Saint-Denis rely on good routes like this feeding into it as a central corridor on the network. Here’s Vision vélo, the city’s plan for bike lane expansion between 2023 and 2027.

Grey is existing routes, green is new protected bike lanes, and red is the plan for new REV or express bike corridors that are planned to be built under the same principles as Saint-Denis. On top of filling in a few gaps, there are also three long and direct routes on Jean-Talon

Street, Lacordaire Boulevard, and Henri-Bourassa Boulevard that feel like they could be game changers too, opening up lots of new currently underserved neighbourhoods and, of course, linking up with the Saint-Denis REV. On top of the design of the lane itself, the route, and the network, the urban environment

Of the city has to play a role in the success of the route. Montreal has a lot of medium-density housing, which means that a lot of people live close to this corridor or a nearby bike route. That’s just going to give higher cycling volumes than if these neighbourhoods were

Full of single-family homes because there are just more people with places to go. The higher densities also mean that there isn’t enough room for everyone to own a car, and that has to help cycling volumes too. One final detail is that there are a lot of bike share stations near this corridor, including

In the summer but especially in the winter as Montreal does a pilot for year-round bike share that basically focuses on the Saint-Denis corridor. One of the most interesting comments we get is when cycling critics tell us something along the lines of “well, my city built bike lanes but hardly anyone uses them!”.

If they tell you where it is you can usually identify the problems pretty quickly, like narrow painted lanes on high-speed roads that don’t connect to much. Of course cyclists aren’t going to be out there in droves. But it’s always interesting how people who never bike themselves often have no awareness

Of what makes a bike route useful or popular. Here’s the formula based on the most popular route in our city. First, full protection or separation is ideal but if that’s not possible, you can still get a pretty good experience by making the bike lane wide, putting it on the side of

Parked cars away from traffic, and making one-way lanes on each side of the street. Second, make the route long, straight, and central through the middle of neighbourhoods so it connects to useful destinations in a way that’s easy to understand and navigate.

Third, connect to other useful bike routes too so that it can take advantage of powerful network effects. Fourth, allow dense housing development around the corridor without mandating a ton of parking so that lots of people can live nearby without necessarily owning a car.

And fifth, if possible, provide a useful and affordable bike share system with stations nearby. Thanks for watching through to the end of the video. Don’t forget to bike and subscribe, and a special thanks to our supporters on Patreon. Cheers to a happy and healthy 2024.