Quite interestingly, out of all the cities we visited I think that perhaps Montreal had transport aspects that Auckland can learn from more than any other place. Perhaps it was because New York is just so different from anywhere else, because Boston’s system is very old and we pretty much walked everywhere anyway, and because Washington DC’s system is just so unique in its design. Whatever it was, I certainly did feel as though I got the most transport ideas from Montreal.
For a start, Montreal was definitely the city which appeared to have done the most to encourage cycling – with those efforts seeming quite successful. Below are a number of photos showing Montreal’s cycling infrastructure:
This is the cycleway along Boulevard de Maisonneuve, one of the main east-west streets in Montreal. I quite like this sort of design for cycle lanes that will carry a high number of people. It’s worth noting that on-street parking on both sides of the road could potentially be retained with cycle lane designs like this.
More cycle lanes, once again showing how it’s possible to provide both cycle lanes and on-street parking. I do like this design because the parked cars form a useful buffer between the cyclists and the moving vehicles – it would be a pretty safe place. It’s also worth noting the number of bikes chained up along the street – typical for Montreal.
Bike racks like these are located everywhere around Montreal – particularly around the Metro stations. I forget the exact way the system works as I only briefly read about it and didn’t use them, but it seemed quite simple and also quite cheap for the first half-hour to an hour – getting progressively more expensive after that to ensure they get mainly used for short commuting trips.
Montreal also has a growing number of “shared spaces”, as shown in this photograph (note the car driving and the pedestrian in the distance walking down the middle). It was amazing to see how the whole “feel” of the street changed when you went from a footpath-kerb-road setup to one where there’s only one street surface and everyone shares it. You immediately want to spring out to walk down the middle, the cars immediately slow down enormously and drive very carefully. Auckland has a lot to look forward to with our proposed shared streets.
Of course I can’t ignore the Montreal Metro. This system was built relatively recently, first opened in 1966 and extended at various points since then. Now it is North America’s third busiest (after New York and Mexico City) rapid transit system – carrying over a million people a day. What I liked about the system was the spaciousness of the stations, the superb information provided about when the next train was coming and the high quality of the trains themselves.
One unusual aspect of the Montreal Metro is that the whole system is run on rubber tires, rather than your usual steel tired train. This actually seems to have a number of advantages: the trains are quieter, the rides seem a bit smoother and I think the trains can deal with steeper slopes than is possible with typical steel tires. I must say I’m quite curious why more cities around the world haven’t gone down that path.
Could Midtown Station look something like this one day?
“I must say I’m quite curious why more cities around the world haven’t gone down that path.”
Friction. And presumably increased maintenance. I know steel wheels have to be taken off and machined “clean” every so often, and that wheels on LU’s Circle Line suffer higher wear and tear on one side of the train than the other. Rubber wheel pads probably need replacing when worn since you can’t clean them up by spinning them on a lathe.
Bicycle rental schemes in Australia have been a big failure because of their bike helmet rules. No one wants to rent one and people don’t want to carry their own around on the off chance they might want to borrow a bicycle.
That’s an interesting point about bike helmets obi – certainly I imagine the rental schemes rely a bit on spontaneous decisions to rent one. And the helmet law makes that much more difficult.
Those are the exact same model of bike as they have put in Melbourne recently. They are actually a very good city bike, well designed for the task, and I’d imagine they cost several thousand dollars each. I hope to be able to buy one when the scheme if folded up. Unfortunately the way the have delivered the bike scheme is a masterpiece of bad planning that is doomed to failure, and currently they are getting about 70 short rides a day from 600 bikes.
Obi, it’s not that people don’t want to rent a helmet, it’s that the state won’t rent them. They say this is because of a law that requires and helmet or headgear rented out to be inspected and sterilised between users, which makes renting helmets prohibitively expensive. However, I have heard that this is just a cover for the real reason, which is legal liability in the case of an accident. If the state rents a helmet to someone who then has a crash and receives a head injury, the state is basically liable for the cost of their healthcare because the provided a helmet that was either defective or not fit for purpose. So the onus on using a helmet is left up to the user, along with the liability. This leads to the ridiculous situation where it is legally ‘safer’ for the state to rent bicycles with no helmet at all than to rent them with a helmet that might possibly be defective or not provide 100% protection!
As you say, quite who they think is going to use this I don’t know. The state has said they expect city dwellers and workers will keep a helmet in their apartment or office which they can grab if they are going to make a quick trip. They do offer a helmet for only $25 when you get an annual subscription. Not too likely IMHO, anyone who would to the trouble of buying a helmet and paying the fees is probably more likely to get their own bike anyway. I suppose it could be handy for a few apartment dwellers who don’t have space to store their own bike. I have seen these in use only a couple of times, each time it was just a couple of backpackers riding along the riverfront bike path sans helmets.
Everyone blames the helmet issue, but there is a much more fundamental problem of planning/marketing. They are basically targeting ‘demand’ that don’t exist. For a start the pricing structure is set up for very short trips, it is free for the first half hour, then a few dollars for the next half hour, then it goes up to an almighty $10 a half hour from then on. Quite obviously the idea is to make quick trips. Secondly, one can only pick up and drop off at the bike kiosks, it doesn’t stop charging you until you lock it back into one of the stands. Thirdly, the stands are only located in the CBD of Melbourne, see here for a map: http://www.melbournebikeshare.com.au/stationmap.
So they have designed a system that can only be used for quick point to point trips within the CBD. But if you look objectively at Melbourne’s transport system that is perhaps the only area that doesn’t need any improvement! Making quick point to point trips in the CBD is already incredibly easy. In the CBD there is not only the underground city loop but also a grid of high frequency trams on every street running both north-south and east-west. They come every minute or so during the day and you can literally just step on and off to you’re hearts content. So why would there be demand for bike trips across the CBD when it is faster, easier, safer and more comfortable to take one of the hundreds of trams?
I have suggested that they relocate half the ranks to get some usage: the real area of need in Melbourne is crosstown travel in the inner suburbs. For example one cannot get from Collingwood across to Melbourne University without going into the CBD and back out again. A journey of only 2.5km along a dead straight road can only be take on foot, or by a 6km detour to the CBD and two trams. Similarly from South Melbourne to South Yarra is a 3km trip along the botanical gardens by bike, but a good 15 minutes by tram to the city then train out two stations again. If they shifted half the bike stations out a couple of kilometres they would find a travel type for which there is actually some un-served demand. Judging by the one picture above, it seem Montreal has at least some of their bikes in the inner suburbs rather than just downtown like Melbourne.
Sorry for the rant!
Thanks for the extra information Nick. I’m not a fan of helmets. I cycled from Sydney to Cairns a few years ago wearing a floppy blue sun hat and had very little problem with the police. One authoritarian rural Queensland copper made me wear my helmet-usually-tucked-under-the-carrier for a few kilometers, and an officer driving past in his car once shouted “wear your helmet” out the window at me. I ignored him. It could be funny tho… I was heading up the Pacific Highway on one long day on the road and a helmet-less teenager shot past me. “The police are coming” he shouted, then swerved off the road, stopped, flipped his bicycle over, and pretended to be adjusting something. I just carried on and nothing happened. I didn’t ever bother wearing a helmet for the five years I was in Darwin and where I rode pretty much everywhere. No one cared. But then no one cared about people sunbathing stark naked in city parks, people shooting fireworks at each other on Mindil Beach on NT Day, women wearing bikinis in the supermarket, people sleeping in the street, and many other situations that usually attract attention elsewhere.
Helmet laws: Scrap them!
Oh, and nice to see you home Admin.
I don’t think we should scrap helmet laws any more than we should scrap seatbelt laws. The research overwhelmingly shows wearing a helmet reduces the severity of cyclist head injuries. It is true that helmets don’t prevent bike crashes and they don’t stop head injuries, just like seatbelts don’t stop car crashes from happening or crash victims being hospitalised. However helmets are very valuable at limiting the severity of injury when crashes do occur: they are often the difference between a minor concussion and a few hours in the emergency department and permanent physical or cognitive disability. Again it’s the same a seatbelts, they don’t stop you getting hurt in a car crash, but they often mean the difference between a week in hospital and life in a wheelchair.
The evidence in every Australian state and NZ shows that cycling has dropped off significantly since helmet laws were introduced. Partly that is because painting something as being dangerous is a good way to scare people away from doing it, and also because people just don’t like helmets. But the problem is that cycling is safer the more people do it. When cycling is normal, drivers know to watch out for cyclists and know how to behave around cyclists. That is one of the reasons that cycling is so safe in the Netherlands, despite the lack of helmet laws and helmets. So helmet laws might (just might) save a few low-velocity head injuries, but have made cycling more dangerous overall.
And of course if helmets were so effective then it would make sense for motorists and pedestrians to wear them too. You never see racing drivers without a helmet, and surely it’d make sense for people climbing ladders and stairs to wear head protection. What happens if a vehicle mounts the pavement or backs out a driveway and hits a pedestrian… a pedestrian helmet might save a head injury.
That is true to an extent, cycling rates did drop after helmet laws were introduced, although they had already started to drop before hand while they have recently increased substantially without their removal. So yes helmet laws we coincident with the decreasing popularity of cycling. They were also coincident with the decreasing popularity of walking and public transport too. All this really reflects is a social shift toward driving. If you look at the rates more closely the adult cycling rate actually stayed the same, the decline was almost entirely due to children giving up on riding to be driven by their parents. Adult cycling rates had already declined by the end of the 60s and stayed low since. I know some anti-helmet campaigners like to blame that on helmets scaring parents about safety, but the simple fact is it started before the helmet laws came in.
Cycling is not actually safer the more people do it, it is safer in countries where people do it a lot (where it is ingrained in the culture, where infrastructure exists and where drivers share the road etc). There is a big difference. In Victoria the increased cycling rate has been met with an identical increase in injuries. Doubling the number of cyclists on melbourne’s stretts will not magically make it like copehagen. Removing helmet laws will not make it like Copenhagen either, it would just increase the severity of those injuries. I have recently completed a report on this topic for a parlimentary inquiry into transport accidents. One thing you might like to note was that 60% of cycle crashes did not involve another party, I.e most have nothing to do with drivers or other road users, although I do believe there is a lot to be gained with driver education.
I’m not sure why you bring up driving as there are massivir restrictions placed on drivers in the name of injury prevention, and huge regulations on vehicle design to minimise severity. We have seat belts, air bags, driver liscence tests, drink drive laws, speeding cameras, crumple zones etc all targeted to the greatest areas if risk. Perhaps car drivers would benefit fro
helmets to reduce head injuries but they have seatbelts and airbagd that are quite effective in that regard. If they could fit bikes with seatbelts, air bags, side intrusion beams etc then perhaps helmets would no longer be the most effective defense against permanent debilitating injury.
I know anti helmet campaigners like to claim cycling is amazingly safe and say things like “but you could get hit by a car walking down the street”. This is not untrue of course, and we do have a lot of safety promotion in this area (especially to do with children in driveways). However it only takes a quick look at the hospital data to show that cycle injury is very common whith a high proportion of head injuries (more common than any other sport or physical activity), yet head injuries sustained while walking in the street are very
uncommon. We don’t need helmets on walkers because the relative risk is so low.
I’d be very surprised if head injuries are higher for cycling than they are for Rugby or League, especially if you count all the concussions.
They are high in football (Aussie rules especially in Vic) however cycling has higher exposure levels, I.e more people spend more time doing it. Football probably has the highest rate but cycling causes the most overall. From a population health perspective cycling is the bigger issue, although we have campaigned to get mandatory headgear part of the footy uniform. Unfortunately the league is too macho and manly to care about head injury and disabilty. They have the same I know best, I’m ok, nothing’ll happen attitude.
Rubber-tyred metro, history of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro
The other really big advantage of rubber-tyred metros (something I was just reading about after visiting Toulouse) is that they can brake and accelerate faster because of the greater friction. Rubber-tyred metros are very common in France (some Parisian lines, Toulouse, Lille). In Toulouse, the (driverless) trains can be signalled at 60 second intervals (system currently close to capacity!).
Great observations of Montreal.
Knowing Vancouver, and having visited Portland, New York, and Montreal I agree with you that Montreal’s bike infrastructure is head and shoulders above the others and have often wondered why, aside from Bixi, it is so often (and unfairly) overlooked.
The simple truth is that without Montreal’s inspiring bicycle lane system, Bixi would not be nearly as attractive or usable to riders. The bi-directional curb-separated lanes on Maissoneuve and other major streets and the car-buffered lanes in the residential areas are simply brilliant and demonstrate investment and permanent political commitment – far more so than painted lanes or removable planters.
Kudos for highlighting Montreal.