Designing facilities for active mobility is no easy task. More than ever, it requires a great deal of information and expertise to make the right decisions. For example: How wide should a pedestrian crossing be? How much should a bike path curve? How fast should people be allowed to go, and should users flow both ways?
These seemingly technical questions actually raise the issue of how to share public space fairly between modes.
They raise questions like:
On all these subjects, discussions can be challenging and involve multiple stakeholders: local residents, shopkeepers, associations, motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, etc.
But, there’s no better way to find the right answers than by using concrete, real-world data!
Here are a few thoughts on infrastructure sizing, with supporting data.
To answer these questions, we conducted a study for the city of Montreal in the Plateau Mont-Royal neighborhood (where our Canadian subsidiary is based! 👋 ) to measure bicycle, car, and pedestrian traffic.
An initial temporary data collection was carried out from April to October 2018 on 19 streets, with a two-week temporary count per street (car, pedestrian, and bike).
Here is the raw data collected on the neighborhood’s main streets:
Temporary counters recorded 1.48 million passes, with:
Based on these short-term traffic counts, the Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT) was extrapolated using a peer-reviewed reference methodology, available here.
This extrapolation made it possible to produce a reliable annual estimate of overall traffic for the period and area of study, and to measure the mode share of each type of user. It showed that the mode share was 56% for vehicles, 32% for pedestrians, and 12% for cyclists.
On Laval Avenue, cyclists accounted for 35% of all users, but the physical space allocated to them represented only 12% of the total street width!
On Clark Street, which had no bicycle facilities (i.e. 0% of physical space allocated exclusively to bicycles), the bicycle mode share nevertheless reached 32% over the period studied!
The special case of Saint Denis Street
When this study was carried out in 2018, Saint Denis Street had no bicycle facilities, and bicycle traffic represented 4% of total users (a fairly low figure compared with other streets).
However, following the deployment of Montreal’s Express Bike Network and the city’s economic recovery plan, Saint Denis Street underwent a major transformation. The space was significantly redistributed, dedicating 54% to pedestrians and green spaces and 15% to cyclists.
To estimate the impact of this redevelopment, Eco-Counter updated our 2018 study using more recent permanent count data, available on the city’s open data portal.
An analysis of before-and-after data (2018 vs. 2021) showed that bicycle and pedestrian traffic had increased thanks to the redevelopment: between 2018 and 2021, pedestrian traffic increased by 9%, and bicycle traffic by 250%!
Since 2022, an interesting trend has also been developing: a significant peak in cycle traffic has appeared on weekday afternoons. This could be explained by the fact that cyclists, in less of a hurry after work, choose a more pleasant and safer route home, even if it meant taking a short detour.
The result? Bicycle traffic has increased 5-fold on weekday afternoons compared to 2018!
At the same time, the local economy has been revitalized, with the opening of 37 new stores in 2021 and the occupancy rate of commercial premises rising from 75% in 2019 to 85% in 2023. These figures corroborate studies showing that developing active modes of transportation is good for local commerce.