Proposals for new or expanded bike lanes are often met with fierce backlash, in a phenomenon dubbed “bikelash,” with car drivers reluctant to lose any street space.
Yet our study finds that the current imbalance of spatial allocation is so overwhelmingly in favour of cars that it’s possible to make substantial improvements to bike infrastructure without significantly decreasing the space allocated per driver.
After all, a key advantage of bicycles is their incredible space-efficiency. Even if all the bike infrastructure space in the city were to double, the proportion of roadway given to cars would not fall below 90 per cent in any borough.
Which is why I’ll likely vote for Projet Montreal again. I bike at least twice a day to drop off and pick up kids, with my older one often accompanying me on her 20" wheeler. She’s been taking to the bike lanes since she was four, and while it’s fairly safe, we did have some hairy situations where I had to yell at both her and drivers to come to an immediate stop. The infra could be better in certain places, which I’m hoping they’d be able to address now that bike traffic has picked up this much.
