The party’s back on.
The first weekend in June, Montrealers will line sidewalks
and porches, toot horns and shout “bonne journee” or just plain “go!” as swarms
of cyclists wend their way through the iconic urban spaces of this bicycle-mad
city.
The Go Bike Montreal Festival is traditionally and once more
the kickoff to a spring and summer season of music, outdoor pursuits, art
extravaganzas and other joie de vivre exuberance.
This is no race of hotshots. Rather, the crowds turn out to
cheer on neighbors and strangers, some 20,000 of them in each of two main
rides, during a week-long festival that celebrates Montreal’s status as one of
North America’s best bicycling cities.
This, in a province with a vast cycling network — Route
Verte — that National Geographic rated first among the world’s top 10 cycling
destinations.
Velo Quebec, the cycling organization that manages the
network and puts on the festival, considers this year’s version to be the first
full-blown one since COVID-19 at first crushed, then curtailed, the annual event
and other large gatherings.
“We’re back to historical numbers,” said Jean-François
Rheault, Velo Quebec’s CEO. “We’re back in celebration mode. Now the
celebration is almost everywhere in the city.”
The festival opens May 28 with the Metropolitan Challenge,
covering routes as long as 145 kilometers (90 miles) in the nearby Monteregie
countryside.
The classic events with closed-off downtown streets are the
following weekend. On June 2, the hordes head out at sunset on Tour la Nuit,
many in oddball costumes with bikes bedecked in carnivalesque lights. On June 4
comes the longer Tour de l’ile de Montreal, covering 45 km, or 28 miles.
Both urban rides begin and end at Parc Maisonneuve, site of
Olympic Stadium, the Biodome and the Montreal Botanical Gardens. Other
landmarks are en route or close by.
Rheault said the pandemic spurred cities including Montreal
to accelerate improvements to bikeways. While bicycle commuting shrank in the
city’s protracted and strictly enforced lockdown, plenty more people took up
cycling as a way to avoid going stir crazy.
“Many who started biking realized they could safely and
efficiently get around,” he said, and they’ve stuck with it.
In the 2019 Tour de l’Île a street corner in a forlorn
warehouse district rang out with bracing songs in French from a Black choir as
cyclists splashed through sheets of driving rain. Surprises like that are
around one corner after another in the festival rides.
Quebec’s dedication to bicycle commuting and touring
development is well known in the cycling and urban-policy worlds, with the more
than 5,000-km (3,000-mile) Route Verte as the backbone. Over a quarter century,
bikeways — bicycle paths, multipurpose trails, protected bike lanes and safe
shoulders — have grown five-fold.
Velo Quebec counts 10,600 km or nearly 6,600 miles of
bikeways in the province. For Montreal alone, its studies find that 2 in 3
adults used a bike for utility purposes — work commutes, shopping, errands — in
2020, up from 42% five years earlier.
The Colorado-based advocacy and research group
PeopleforBikes, which produces worldwide ratings on urban biking, ranks
Montreal No. 1 among large cities in North America for bike-friendly
attributes.
Similarly, an MIT book on global cycling trends by urban
planning researchers John Pucher of Rutgers University and Ralph Buehler of
Virginia Tech named Montreal a world leader in establishing a safe network for
bike commuting and recreation.
Pucher told the AP the city was “way ahead of the curve” in
producing “the most comfortable, the least stressful bicycling infrastructure.”
Even before COVID got even more people on bikes, Montreal
experienced a nearly two-thirds drop in the rate of serious cycling injuries
since 2000 as the city’s bike network more than doubled, Buehler and Pucher
found.
Cycling in the U.S. and Canada has been shaped by three
waves, said Rheault, of Velo Quebec.
First came initial bike trails in the 1970s, many in
existing parks. Then a surge in bike paths and the advent of urban bike-share
from 2005 to 2010. The COVID era brought on the third wave as e-bike sales have
surged and the next generation of bike lanes, wider and better protected than
before, has taken shape. -AP