Rebuilt Parc Mont Royal road now UNSAFE for road bikes - by design!
Nice sharp cement curb, and a generous six inches space for bikes to ride, unsafely!
With no space for bikes, the rebuild of this road amplifies danger to RED ALERT level.
No room for the car to pass the bike, and no paved shoulder: car-bike conflict guaranteed.
The 2010 Mont Royal road reconstruction has created a road that is highly UNSAFE for road bikes, and especially for the people riding them.
We said so on Thursday, June 10 and now Vélo Quebec says so too.
What took them so long?
The "improvements" to the road on the west side of Mont Royal Park (Remembrance) is a disaster for cyclists. The reason is that the road is too narrow for bikes and cars, and there is no paved shoulder, or road shoulder of any kind. There is a sharp cement curb, and there is zero road space allotted for cyclists.
This is seriously WTF. Someone at the transport department purposely left out any accommodation for bicycles to ride on this road beside the cars.
Cyclists do not want to be in the middle of the road blocking car traffic. Cyclists don't mind riding on the road shoulder. In fact we love paved road shoulders. A lack of paved shoulders caused a hugely tragic group of cyclist deaths last summer. There was an outcry for paved shoulders for roads popular with cyclists. This road up and over Mont Royal is highly popular with road cyclists. It is even used for world-class bicycle road races. And still, they designed and built a road without any paved shoulders, it is if the road was designed for an alternative universe, a universe where bicycles never existed at all.
The only thing world class about the Parc Mont Royal road reconstruction project is that it is a world class FAILURE. We cannot believe that this redesign of the road got past dozens of design reviews and no one ever said, hey, this road is popular with cyclists, so where are the shoulders to share the road safely with bicycles?
This is a deliberate poke in the eye to road cyclists from the Montreal City roads department.
****************
Update
we got some details wrong, the part that we think is unsafe about the rebuild is almost minor compared to the bike path section that Velo Quebec is talking about. Click here for more info in La Presse (french) with an excellent photo. Dangerous and completely demented, they say, and we agree totally.
There is some lively discussion on this subject at the Velocia website.
posted by Cycle Fun Montreal @ 6:23 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
That just makes no sense. Who on earth would approve that?
Actually Velo Quebec is talking about a different issue slightly further west that has nothing to do with missing shoulders and neither you or they knew about in June!
As you know there is a new mixed-use path along Cote des Neiges along the cemetery. When you cycle south along this path you hit Remembrance Road (at the other end of where you took a photograph). You are then funnelled onto a bidirectional path climbing the mountain between cyclists going down at high speeds on your left, and cars going down at high speeds on your right with zero barriers.
(see e.g. the picture here:
http://www.cyberpresse.ca/actualites/regional/montreal/201010/08/01-4330674-piste-cyclable-sur-le-mont-royal-dangereux-et-completement-dement.php
)
actually, we were wondering about this very thing, and especially since velo quebec cares almost zero amount about high performance road cyclists. Because if they did, the camelien houde climb would at least have a "share the road" sign on it!
So, this means there are TWO major problems with this road redesign.
Post a Comment
<< Home