Why Bike Lanes are a Key Issue in Montreal's Looming Municipal Election
// In October 2024, Valérie Plante, the head of the Projet Montréal party, announced she wouldn't be running for re-election as mayor of Montreal. Plante had assumed office, as the top municipal official in Canada's second largest city, in November 2017. Under her leadership, the "project" behind the name Projet Montréal became manifest in the streets of the city. Dozens of kilometers of streets were pedestrianized, including such major commercial arteries as Wellington, Mont-Royal, and Sainte-Catherine. (Some street closures are seasonal, and happen during the warm months, but Projet Montréal has just announced the year-round pedestrianization of the eastern part of Rue Sainte-Catherine, all the way to Avenue Papineau.) In the last eight years, the city has become noticeably greener: a verdissement program has seen over a thousand trees planted, hundreds of hectares of concrete torn up and greened with native plants, and the introduction of eight new ruelles vertes (green, traffic-calmed alleyways).
The development of the city's public transport network has been far more modest: the last métro station in the Montreal area to open was on the Orange Line, in Laval, in 2007, and tunnelling for the long-overdue Blue Line extension, which will add five new stations in the city's east end, has only just begun. A frequent bus initiative, with guaranteed headways of ten minutes or less on major lines, was suspended when ridership struggled to recover after the pandemic. The big news in the Montreal area is the opening, operating struggles, and ongoing construction of one of North America's most ambitious transit project, the Réseau express métropolitain, an automated, mostly elevated light-rail network, which I wrote about here. The REM is being built by Quebec's giant, and very rich, pension fund, and the métro and bus network have their own management; as in other parts of Canada, big transport projects fall under the authority of the province, not municipalities.
