This story is adapted from an original article from May 6, 2026 in URBANIA, an online magazine based in Quebec focused on pop culture and society.
There are too many cars in Montreal, Soraya.
You insisted you were accessible, close to the people—so first names it is. Let's pretend we're having coffee in my kitchen in Hochelaga, the riding you represented for five years in the House of Commons.
Right. Cars.
I won't even get into the environmental arguments, since they don't seem to carry much weight in your party's decision-making. I'll keep it simple. I'll talk math. You like numbers, don't you?
Between 2004 and 2017, the number of vehicles in Montreal grew from 854,000 to 969,000—a rate 50% faster than population growth. Meanwhile, the island stayed the exact same size. It didn't stretch itself out to the river to accommodate all these cars. It didn't annex the South Shore and Laval to spare us from their chaotic bridges.
The city's road network covers roughly 4,050 kilometres of lanes. According to a recent Polytechnique study, 78% of that space is allocated to cars. Pedestrians get 20%. Cycling infrastructure gets 1.5%. Public transit gets 0.5%.
Since moving to Montreal in 2005, I've lived in that remaining 22%. It took me a few years to work up to utility cycling. I grew up at the end of a gravel road in the Eastern Townships; for me, a bicycle meant riding on dirt roads where maybe one car passed per hour. I still remember one spring morning when a colleague living in Rosemont rode me to UQAM on the back of his bike, the vertiginous feeling of cars grazing us on Saint-Denis. (The REV—Montreal's express cycling network—didn't even exist as a dream back then.)
I'm telling you all this because I get the impression that you rarely travel on two wheels. So I'd like to invite you to ride with me, for a trip I'd take more often if I weren't, frankly, afraid of it.
We start in Hochelaga, naturally. We're going to Montreal-Nord, to the Henri-Bourassa library. I've been heading there regularly since my writer's residency there back in 2016–2017; they bring me in to run writing workshops and mentoring sessions.
We head east on de Rouen first, along what is optimistically called a shared lane. In practice, that means a bicycle painted on the asphalt, an oft-ignored reminder to drivers that cyclists are technically allowed to be here. It offers about as much protection as a busted helmet.
De Rouen is a narrow two-way street lined with parking spaces that are always full.
1. Getting doored
Since my own dooring in 2016, which left me with a temperamental right knee, I am physically incapable of riding within a metre of a parked car. A kind of post-traumatic reflex, I suppose. But on streets like de Rouen, when the driver behind you loses patience and can't wait three and a half seconds to pass safely, you grit your teeth and drift toward the doors that could launch you onto the asphalt.
We turn onto de Chambly—another shared lane, joy of joys—and head north, where it becomes 16th Avenue. The street runs one-way southbound, except for cyclists, and that's where the next trap snaps shut: the intersection at Rosemont Boulevard.
Keep reading “5 Easy Ways to Get Killed While Cycling in Montreal”
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Your actual odds of being in a collision with a car as a cyclist is 2-7 in 100,000 trips per SPVM data so maybe we need to tone down the hyperbole here. But yeah, underserved areas need better cycling infrastructure. Why they don't have it isn't because of a change in administration but decades long systemic disinvestment in our most diverse and/or low income neighbourhoods and mainstream bike advocacy that centers Eurocentric, predominantly male, upper middle-class needs. During the Plante administration, men's cycling increased from 58 to 72% while women's cycling DECREASED from 48 to 44% per a Leger Marketing report prepared for Vélo Québec. The gap between the two is the highest it has been since 2000 (earliest year reported) where it was 5%.This is also the lowest rate of women cycling since 2010 despite most research indicating that safer cycling infrastructure increases women's cycling rates begging the question on how safe Plante era cycling infrastructure really is. Before laying this at the feet of a racialized woman, clean your own house because by and large women from the dominating culture (Valérie Plante, Marianne Giguère, Suzanne Lareau) are responsible for this. Something is clearly broken with mainstream cycling advocacy, urbanism, and white feminism when policies and practices are so clearly benefiting one group over another.
At least SMF faces enough pressure from Cycling Groups that she can't be as openly hostile to cycling infrastructure as she would like to be. The cagey language around REV Lacodaire is evidence to that. We also pressured her into creating real cycling infra on Parc which has claimed so many lives. With the expansion of Bixi into the West Island, political support for cycling in even the most Hitlarian of conscriptions is slowly moving towards a vision that leaves us all safer. Thanks for the article!
Pedestrians, cyclists and DRIVERS should be made to read an article. 🚴