Montreal Gazette: Pedestrians and joggers among bike-path hazards

A puzzling crack in the pavement of a major downtown artery has put a bit of a damper on the new bicycle path. As keen as cyclists are to have a safe, dedicated, cross-downtown route, who would have thought it would involve closing part of Montreal’s busiest commercial district?

I thought I had a handle on the dangers that lurk behind the apparent safety of a bike path. And as a public service, I thought to warn cyclists what to expect as we all crowd into the confines of the new de Maisonneuve bike path in November when it is expected to be finished — a list of risks that now should, I suppose, include road collapses.

In the first few weeks of cycling into work through heavy traffic — The Gazette’s offices are at the corner of Peel and Ste. Catherine Sts. — it always came as a relief to join up with the bike path. There, I was temporarily out of striking distance of Montreal’s notoriously bad drivers.

I have learned, to digress briefly, that the worst drivers are, in order of worst to not quite so bad:

Taxi drivers.

Women.

Young men in expensive cars.

Old men in expensive cars.

Anyone in a Hummer.

Any idiot on a cellphone.

Plus, the alarming number of pedestrians who on the evidence think they are protected by an invisible shield.

But bike paths themselves are not risk-free. You can’t actually hear when another cyclist is coming up behind at such a clip that if you stray a millimetre from your place on the path you could be sent flying. At least with a car, you know to crowd over to one side.

But other cyclists are not the real problem. You soon learn not to stray. There are other, scarier, users of bike paths:

An elderly woman pushing her walker in the middle of the bike path, thereby doubling her chances, already good, of being hit by one of the cyclists who sprint along the bike path in Westmount Park. She had spurned the perfectly serviceable sidewalk a metre away.

An elderly man in his wheelchair, pushed by two women, the three of them occupying the entire width of the path, again nicely upping their chances of getting hit.

Anyway, you get the picture: Joggers, joggers wearing earphones so they can’t hear cyclists warning of their approach (some actually try), mothers pushing strollers, entire day-care centres pushing wagons full of kids.

As for cyclists, they range in age and occupation and attitude. Some are painfully law-abiding, others sail through intersections barely glancing at oncoming traffic.

Studies on cycling have proliferated in the past decade as cities are either pushed by cyclists into making improvements or else decide on their own to try to encourage cycling as a health and environmental-protection measure.

The one point of common consensus is that the health benefits of cycling far outweigh the risks — by a factor of 20, according to British research.

But there is little agreement on cycling safety. Are bike paths more or less safe than whatever the alternative is? The number of factors that enter into play is large:

Is the terrain flat, as in Holland? Do authorities crack down hard on anyone who does not obey traffic laws, as they do in Holland? Are city centres planned and organized to allow everyone to share road space safely, as in Holland? Holland, you will have guessed, has an excellent track record. In 1970, 512 cyclists were killed in accidents. By 2004, that number had dropped to 149.

A 2006 study by the Organization for Economic

Co-operation and Development attributed the drop in deaths to Holland’s having separated fast and slow traffic, creating a distinct infrastructure for cyclists.

The OECD is mute on the subject of people pushing walkers or wheelchairs along specially created cycling infrastructure, but the city of Montreal should not be. A public-safety campaign is in order, perhaps like those grotesque, but effective pictures of diseased lungs on cigarette packages.

Only this time signs should be strategically placed at the start of bike paths — with winged cyclists bearing down on all the people who should not be using the path.

- Bagnall writes for the Montreal Gazette.