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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • As someone that has been living in Montreal for the past four years, which locale this article brings up numerous times, and biking about 350/365 days a year, I have to highlight a couple things to readers not from Montreal, or maybe even from the other side of the pond:

    • Canada doesn’t know what yield signs are. Stop signs are on every corner, which are mostly handled as if they were yield signs, but maybe not even that. And this applies to all traffic, not just cyclists.
    • Canada also doesn’t know what “right has the right of way” is. In some European countries if you come to an intersection without a light, a yield or stop sign, you simply give way to the vehicle approaching from the right.
    • The individual boroughs have a lot of disconnect between each other on how traffic is handled. While they are trying to have a unified approach, there’s a lot of Balkanization.
    • Much of the infra is dated. A remainder of design from the 60s and 70s that had patchwork applied to make it more livable. Things like green wave, automated traffic control or elevated pedestrian crossings and bicycle lanes at intersections are unheard of. Most lights are just set to a fixed cycle and have been operating like the same way for years.
    • Intersections, especially with new developments, will have very sharp corners with narrow sidewalk, with greatly reduced visibility.

    So that said, I rarely ever see the NYC courier style red-light skips between columns of cars by cyclists. Whenever I see that happen, it’s trashy people that seem to have little regard for anything, even their own lives.
    I do see cyclists regularly doing Idaho stops at full stop intersections, but it’s the same as cars. I think this is a traffic design issue and not an issue with driving culture or cyclists in general. Stop signs are simply a bad design, and this has been elaborated on many times.

    I also see a lot of people ride on the e-bike bixi fleet recklessly. They provide far too much speed assist with minimal effort. The same goes with the electric motor bikes with a throttle that somehow pass as e-bike just because they also have the option for pedal assist. However this is not a problem with the vehicles themselves, but rather the lack of education and handling. In most western European nations children are taught how to bike in traffic and adhere to traffic rules at an early age. I can attest to this as I have grown up in Germany, and in grade 4 elementary we had to get our Fahrrad Führerschein, which was basically an attestation of having a course completed, for children.