“Nobody is against bike paths, everybody’s just against the policies and the way they’re being implemented,” says Marc Perez of the Coalition for Democracy Montréal.
Enough is enough, says a group planning legal action against the city of Montreal over the way it has been building bike paths.
Decrying a lack of citizen consultation, Coalition for Democracy Montréal says the goal is for bike paths to be implemented in a way that accommodates cyclists, citizens and businesses alike. The group will present its plan at a rally in front of city hall during a council meeting Monday evening.
“The thing is that nobody is against bike paths, everybody’s just against the policies and the way they’re being implemented,” said group director Marc Perez.
The city’s goal is to create a safer, more efficient bike path network, but some of the projects have been met with criticism over a lack of meaningful consultations on how they might negatively affect nearby residents, groups and businesses, say those who oppose them.
“The biggest challenge that we have is that a lot of these consultations are not real consultations, they’re just information sessions,” Perez said.
In addition to ensuring proper consultation for future bike paths, part of the goal of the legal action will be to reconfigure those that have already been built and have been causing problems locally, Perez said.
“The way that we present it to the citizens is that if they come and they help us financially, they can come up with a list of recommendations that they would like modified and we will try to include that within the lawsuit or the negotiation depending on how the lawsuit goes.”
Perez said he has come up with a few solutions himself — such as prioritizing roads wide enough to maintain parking spaces when adding bike paths — but that they fall on deaf ears.
“They have certain configurations in other boroughs where they have both the bike path and the parking,” he said. “So they are capable of doing it. They’re just choosing not to do it. That’s the main concern.”
The group has mandated the help of Bergman and Associates for the case. It will be directed at the city itself, as well as “any borough where similar developments negatively impact citizens.”
The group has collected $32,000 in donations from residents and merchants to put toward the case over the past year. The fundraising effort is “a testament to the strength and unity of our community,” Coalition for Democracy Montréal volunteer Peter Hatzipetros said in a statement.
“It astounds me that we’ve had to go to such lengths to protect our safety, lives and livelihoods,” he said. “Our next step is clear: we’re committed to holding the city accountable and ensuring that our voices are not just heard, but acted upon.”
The city of Montreal did not respond to a request for comment.
Jean-François Rheault, CEO of Vélo Québec, said he disagrees with the group’s approach, but understands the concerns: the city should indeed be having open dialogue about such projects. But he added that he feels the city has gotten a lot better at seeking the input of citizens and businesses over the past few years, pointing out that the Terrebonne path, for example, was the subject of discussions for four years.
“They went back, they hired consultants, they have a report that has hundreds of pages — it’s not possible to do it slower than that,” Rheault said. “I feel the group is confusing consultation and consensus. … It’s impossible to find city projects that will reach a consensus.”
If streets are meant to be shared by everyone, then it must be considered, Rheault said, that 50 per cent of households in downtown Montreal don’t have a car and would therefore benefit from additional mobility options. Those numbers are similar in Parc-Extension, Rheault added.
“Building a safe and efficient bicycle network is infrastructure that is inclusive,” he said. “Inclusive for kids, inclusive for families, inclusive for elderly people. We see that when we build bike paths, more people have more ways to get around, more people can choose the bicycle as a mode of transportation. So for me, developing the bicycle network is giving more mobility options to more people.”
When it comes to groups making suggestions and feeling ignored, Rheault said one that comes up a lot is to build bidirectional bike paths as opposed to two unidirectional ones in an effort to take up less space.
“It will take less space — but it will also be more dangerous at intersections,” he said. “Sometimes, (for) people who do not necessarily have good knowledge about the implication of traffic safety, it’s easier to say, ‘You can just change it, like this, and it will be better for everyone’” — but that’s not necessarily the case.