The cars are going to be alright: Measuring bike space and car space in Montréal

Abstract

While Montréal is often hailed as the most "biking-friendly" city in North America, our study finds that only 2.3% of the city's roadways are allocated to bike infrastructure, with car infrastructure occupying the remaining 97.7% of road space.  

Proposals for new or expanded bike lanes are often met with fierce backlash, in a phenomenon dubbed "bikelash", with drivers reluctant to lose any street space. Yet, we find that the current imbalance of spatial allocation is so overwhelmingly in favour of cars, it is possible to make substantial improvements to bike infrastructure without significantly decreasing the space allocated per driver.

Street for Cars

Since the early 20th century, cities in Canada, the United States, and globally have been reshaped around the automobile. Among the most confronting aspects of this transformation is the loss of street space for pedestrians, bicyclists, and urban life, as roadways have come to dominate the urban landscape.

The cost of molding the city to the figure of the car is steep, and today there is a growing awareness of the harms of what has been called “automobility”, which range from CO₂ pollution, to fatalities from car crashes, risks to the health of drivers, and the erosion of public and community spaces.

Cities now have been experiencing movements trying to change the car-dominated reality of our cities, including “complete streets” projects, “Vision Zero” policies, and COVID-19 era street redesigns. In Canada, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) released a COVID-19 street rebalancing guide, and cities have shifted space away from car infrastructure in favour of pedestrians, cyclists, and urban life.

The growth of cycling and other forms of micromobility, especially through sharing systems, has been part of the changing urban streetscape, involving calls for improving dedicated bike infrastructure, such as separated bike lanes. Montréal, which has long had a cycling culture, is now undertaking to expand its more than 900 km of cycling infrastructure. Yet, bike lane projects are frequently met with protest.

This fight over the shape of the street is, in essence, a conflict about public space: who it is designed for, who it is used by, and who has the right to it. When protests erupt over the introduction of a bike lane, it is the subtraction of space from cars that angers drivers. But one of the key advantages of bikes is that they ask for little space.

Despite cars already having so much space to move, even in Montréal – a "cycling city" – drivers still feel pressed for space. Are they?

Measuring Montréal 

Compiling a swath of data sources, we measured how street space was allocated, borough by borough, across Montréal, and also how street space allocation related how people travelled in the city. In Montréal, there is 42.76 km² (79.6%) of car infrastructure, 4.17 km² (18.8%) of pedestrian infrastructure, and 1.02 km² (1.6%) of dedicated bike infrastructure. 

If we only consider the balance between car infrastructure and bike infrastructure, the portrait is more dire: cars have 97.7% of the roadway, and bikes only 2.3%. In contrast, of trips using these modes, 95.1% use the car and 4.9% use bikes, demonstrating a 212% discrepancy. The borough with the greatest proportion of the roadway allocated to bikes is Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, with only 4.65% of street space for dedicated bike infrastructure. Yet, 21.9% of trips that start in Le Plateau-Mont-Royal use bikes. 

If we calculate the space per traveller (in terms of square meters), we find that car travellers are given 5.8 m²/traveller, while bike travellers are given 4.5 m²/traveller. In Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, the most popular borough for cycling, bike travellers are only given 1.5 m² per traveller, compared to 3.4 m² for drivers. 

The measure of space per traveller is fairly intuitive, but to better capture the relationship between the two, we can use the novel Equal Infrastructure Allocation measure (EIA), which measures the proportion between bike and car infrastructure, relative to traveller counts. When EIA is 0, infrastructure allocation is considered equal between the two modes; when it is below 0, it is biased in favour of the automobile.

This novel indicator finds 9 (of 19) boroughs in Montréal with a score below 0, meaning that there is inequality in spatial allocation per traveller in favour of cars. Le-Plateau-Mont-Royal is among the worst in these terms, with an EIA score of -0.55.

What if we built a lot of bike infrastructure?

Given the degree to which street space in Montréal is allocated to cars, is there really a need to worry about car space? There is anger over the addition of a single bike lane – how much space does this really take? Street space allocation measures can be used to model these scenarios.

Montréal’s BIXI bikeshare system has more than 11,000 bikes and 900 stations, as of April 2024. What if we took a really radical approach, and doubled the capacity of this system – 22,000 bikes over 1800 stations? The total space used by the BIXI system is only 0.021 km². Doubling this only reduces the amount of automobile space by -0.003m²/traveller.

Bikesharing infrastructure takes very little space. Though Montréal’s bikesharing system is station-based (docked), “dockless” systems are often derided over perceptions of their disorderly use of space. There are solutions to better organize stationary dockless vehicles, including “virtual docks”, and the use of typical bike racks and corrals, that have been found effective in improving parking compliance. As we can see through this modelling, there is more than ample space available for these installations, without substantially affecting the space allocated to automobiles.

What if we took a more radical approach, and doubled all the bikelanes in Montréal? The bike area would increase by +4.45m²/traveller, and the car area would only decrease by -0.14m²/traveller. In Le-Plateau-Mont-Royal, drivers would lose just -0.15m²/traveller. The EIA score would improve by +0.8, with all but two boroughs having a positive EIA. Even then, the proportion of automobile area of the roadway never falls below 90%. While the picture for bikes improves dramatically, there is almost no discernable effect on automobile area per traveller. Proportionally, automobiles will still dominate spatial allocation. 

This demonstrates a disproportional benefit provided by bike infrastructure projects, where changes to bike area can significantly improve matters for cyclists while minimally affecting automobile area.

Changing Our Streets

Backgrounded by climate change, traffic fatalities, the growing popularity of bikes and other forms of micromobility, and a realization that the form of the modern street is actively harmful, cities find themselves at an inflection point, with the opportunity to reshape their mobility landscape.

In effect, there is increasingly widespread agreement about the direction of desirable change: away from automobility. Yet, planners, policy makers, and advocates face entrenched opposition to any policies which engender the system and structure of automobility, including street space reallocation. Cases of “bikelash”, even for modest bike infrastructure proposals, demonstrate this well.

We’ve introduced the measure of Equal Infrastructure Allocation (EIA), to assess and clearly communicate the provision of bike infrastructure, relative to automobile infrastructure. This measure, alongside those of dedicated bike infrastructure area per traveller and automobile infrastructure area per traveller, can be used to illustrate the effects of future infrastructure scenarios on spatial allocation. EIA is intended to assist planners, policy makers, and advocates with communicating about reallocation proposals with the public.

Perhaps with its use and the use of other tools developed in street space allocation studies, it can be made evident that even with bike infrastructure improvements at a scale dramatically larger than anything now proposed, such as doubling all existing dedicated bike lanes, street space allocation remains biased in favour of cars; such is the extent of the current domination of automobility. 

Original research :

Romm, D., Jasso Chávez, J. A., Kinman, L. et al. (2025). The cars are going to be alright: Examining micromobility infrastructure space allocation and potential improvement scenarios in Montréal. Journal of Cycling and Micromobility Research, Volume 5

Disclosure statement :

The author has no conflict of interest to declare.

Credits of the cover image :

© Anne Williams

How to cite this News?

Romm D. (2025). The cars are going to be alright: Measuring bike space and car space in Montréal. Observatoire du vélo

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