The Government of Quebec is counting on the electrification of individual and collective transport to reduce greenhouse gases. In turn, cities too, but they have another string to their bow to promote sustainable mobility: adapting their road networks to cycling. A mission tackled by the engineer of the Urban Planning and Mobility Department of the City of Montreal, Julien Paquette-Verdi.
As a teenager, Julien Paquette-Verdi spent his life cycling in the Rosemont district, where he grew up, and around. “It was my natural mode of transport, faster and more economical than the bus. I was more independent too, ”recalls the 30-year-old. At 16, like many young people in search of freedom, he obtained his driver’s license, adopted the car and “gave up the ‘bicycle’ a little, a lot”, he admits, making today his mea- guilty. For convenience, he started pedaling again to go to university, but it was in his mid-twenties, during his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering with a transport option at Polytechnique Montréal, that he had a click.
“I became aware at that time of the environmental impacts of our transport, and that encouraged me to make the leap from passive citizen to activist. During my last two years of studies, I specialized in sustainable mobility with the aim of taking the world on board,” says the certified cyclist, whose job now consists of making the daily lives of pedal riders easier. After four years of working in this direction for engineering consulting firms, he has been employed since last January by the City of Montreal as an engineer in bicycle mobility planning.
Its mission is clear: to plan and design the infrastructures that will promote cycling trips over the next decade so that they represent 15% of utilitarian trips in the Montreal agglomeration by 2030.
This objective targeted by the administration of Valérie Plante is still far from being achieved: this rate was 3.3% two years ago, according to theState of cycling in Montreal in 2020, published by Vélo Québec, with peaks in the central districts of Plateau Mont-Royal (13.1%), Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (8.7%), Villeray (7%) and Rosemont (5.8%) ).
Julien Paquette-Verdi remains no less optimistic. “The potential for change is there. Montreal is not Amsterdam when it comes to cycling culture, but mentalities are changing rapidly, and the cohabitation between motorists and cyclists is much better than before. In terms of urban planning, we also have an interesting density so that cycling becomes an option in its own right. »
According to the origin-destination survey conducted in 2018 by the Mobility Chair of Polytechnique Montréal, 18 to 25% of motorized trips could be made by bicycle on the island. As for the 2016 census, it allowed Statistics Canada to calculate that about 33% of Montrealers live less than 5 km from their place of work, a distance that takes about 20 minutes to cover by calf strength.
More cycle paths, more cyclists
Currently, 1.1 million of the island’s 2 million inhabitants claim to be cyclists, according to Vélo Québec. Among them, about 740,000 say they make utilitarian use of the bicycle, half of them using it as a mode of transport at least once a week. For these numbers to increase, the polls are unanimous: people would cycle more and more regularly if the cycling network were safer, more developed and less discontinuous.
These intentions are confirmed in practice, as evidenced by the success of the new Réseau express vélo (REV) on rue Saint-Denis, which is more than 8.7 km long, and the cycle path on rue Rachel. , on which, year after year, more than a million trips are made. Both are physically separated from vehicular traffic.
“It’s not the only one, but the development of new cycle paths remains our main lever. We are thus meeting a need and creating an induced demand”, confirms the engineer, whose role is to identify the routes to be prioritized by crossing technical and socio-demographic data and by carrying out counts in situ. “The objective is to find the most profitable projects in terms of modal shift from car to bicycle. »
Then comes the design phase, in collaboration with his colleagues in road and public transport. And that’s where it gets tricky. Because to make room for the bike, “we will always sacrifice a little of the immense space allocated to the car”, agrees Julien Paquette-Verdi.
“The difficulty is to convince citizens by overcoming their emotional blockages. We work hard upstream of a project to document its impacts and its benefits in order to present the facts to them, explain to them where the acceptable compromises are and show them that it can work with the help of concrete examples”, underlines- he, adding that consultation is essential to the success of a redevelopment of public roads in favor of cycling. “If we want people to get on board, everyone has to be convinced! »