I Visited the Best* City in North America

Montreal is one of the largest cities in Canada and it's a city that has made huge improvements over the past few years with recent projects to improve public transit install protected bike lanes and even pedestrianized many streets since starting this YouTube channel I've had a lot of people tell me that Montreal is the best city in North America but that's kind of like saying you've got the best smelling out housee right what I really wanted to know was how does Montreal compare to the great cities of Europe so I spent an entire week there to find out make yourself comfortable and grab a cup of tea cuz this is the longest video I've ever made Montreal is the largest city in the province of Quebec it's located on this island creatively called E de maral the city doesn't quite consume the whole island and it's split up in weird ways but that's not important right now now I've been to Montreal several times but the last time was over 20 years ago what I remember most is that there were a lot of abandoned buildings and the roads were full of potholes now the abandoned buildings are being turned into condos and fewer roads are full of potholes Montreal is a vibrant City with several mix use walkable neighborhoods and actually the French language and history makes it more culturally interesting than most other Canadian cities plus there's poutin which is so good with the proper squeaky cheese curds Montreal has a pretty good public transit system especially for Canada the Metro is made up of four lines with a total of 68 stations the trains come as often as 2 minutes during rush hour and every 3 to 10 minutes off peak this makes it very easy to get around by Metro even if you need to change lines some of the stations even have crossplatform transfers to make transferring even easier I'm a big fan of these in general the system is clean and fairly wellmaintained and I used it a lot while I was visiting one thing that's quite unique is that the Montreal Metro uses trains with rubber tires rather than steel wheels like a typical train this is because the Montreal Metro is based on a technology used in Paris in general Quebec prefers to implement Technologies from France rather than the US and Canada both for practical and political reasons I thought that rubber tires would mean that the trains would be quieter but they're really not however these trains are some of the most reliable Metro Rolling Stock in the entire world so there are definitely benefits to this approach but it gets better there are big plans in Montreal to extend the public transit system through a new automated light rail system called the REM when completed the REM will be a comprehensive light rail system connecting Montreal and some of the surrounding cities and although Nim managed to cancel the Eastern portion most of the system will be opening in 2024 the first small part of this network had just opened a few weeks before I arrived so I had the opportunity to ride it and it's pretty great the trains are bright and spacious and the ride is comfortable the stations have platform screen doors which are important for safety but also for reliability as they prevent anything from falling onto the tracks and the trains have level boarding which really should be the norm for every new transit system everywhere the trains are also driverless which is really nice to see there are so many Metro systems in the world including Amsterdam that are struggling to keep up with demand because of a lack of drivers so it's good to see Montreal building a driverless system from the start but the best part of driverless trains is that you can sit up front and pretend you're driving the REM vehicles are basically fancy dual length trams and there are questions as to whether these vehicles will be able to keep up with future Demand versus building a standard Metro System instead but I'll leave that discussion to RM Transit who has covered this project extensively links in the description one of the most impressive Parts is that the construction of the REM only started in 2018 and the first Branch opened in 2023 which is pretty fast construction proving that new Transit projects can be built quickly with enough political will now when I judge a city one of the first things I look for is how easy is it to get from the airport and into town specifically is there a highfrequency rail connection to the rest of the city unfortunately Montreal fails this test and the only public transit from the airport is this clunky bus which is really not good enough however I'm very happy to see that there are plans to extend the REM trains to the airport by 2027 so hopefully this situation won't be around for much longer the biggest difference you'll see between Montreal and other Canadian cities is the type of housing in short the missing middle isn't missing here in most Canadian cities the majority of residential land is zoned only for single family homes these are the only type of homes that can be built there which leads to this crazy situation where you will see only single family homes and condo towers with almost nothing in between many cities are finally realizing that this is a ridiculous situation though it took a serious housing crisis for anyone to do anything about it Toronto for example has finally made it legal to build this kind of housing again Montreal is a glimpse of what similar cities could look like in a few decades if they eliminated single family zoning this means that for most of Montreal there is sufficient density to allow for efficient public transportation and enough foot traffic to support a multitude of small businesses Montreal is also becoming very well known for its cycling infrastructure the city has over 900 km of bicycle lanes and many of these Lanes have been built in just the last few years when I visited I was very fortunate to be able to ride around with ston blle one of the engineers who helped design a lot of this bicycle infrastructure so I learned a lot about not just what they built but why and how they built it the way they did I rode around on the Montreal Bike Share bikes called bixie uh these are great for casual use like many Bike Share systems around the world the system uses an app uh to unlock a bike from the dock there are even ebikes available too which came in handy several times but if you ebike in Montreal you are required to wear a helmet and that includes the bixie bikes so I bought one at a local bike shop which honestly was fine because there were several times where I didn't feel comfortable cycling without a helmet I guess living in Amsterdam has made me soft the the bicycle infrastructure in Montreal varies greatly in quality the older infrastructure is mostly just paint but the newer stuff is quite a bit better although this one is one of the first bike paths that the city ever installed in the 1980s and it's better than a lot of the stuff that came later some quiet residential streets just have signs allowing side by-side cycling several one-way residential streets have these contraflow bicycle Lanes it would be nice if people cycling could always go the opposite way down a oneway street but Canadian cities don't seem to like that idea so these dedicated lanes are useful and in this case the bike Lanes also narrow the street which is best for safety anyway it was also nice to see that some streets had temporary cycling infrastructure to make it safe during construction I didn't see a lot of places for bicycle parking but what I did see was decent this bicycle area outside of one of the Metro stations was definitely the best one I found the most impressive neighborhood for cycling is probably Plateau Montreal where the main Street has been recently converted into a single Lane of traffic in both directions with protected bicycle Lanes on either side this is part of the Rev a network of Express bicycle routes across the city these are marked clearly in blue so that they are easy to follow you can see here where the Rev diverts off the main street with the blue paint and blue sign showing which way to go some of these rev lanes are very wide when the street allows for it and these bicycle lanes are mostly designed for longdistance travel by bicycle only a very small portion of this network has been built but the city plans to extend it by 2027 after a few hours of riding stayon got a flat tire so we walked to the nearest bike shop I have to say this is one thing that Canada does better than the nland when it comes to cycling a bike shop will actually fix a flat tire for you within the hour in the Netherlands or in Amsterdam at least there are bike shops everywhere but they're often so busy that you could be waiting days to get a flat tire fixed while we waited we checked out the nearby Jean Talon Market which is a lovely Neighborhood Market with stalls for everyday groceries as well as specialty shops and unique restaurants on one side of the market the street had been redesigned recently to provide more space for people which is really nice it does surprise me though that several streets of the market are still open to motor vehicles and it's not just for deliveries most of these cars are just Market customers who didn't want to walk after the flat tire was fixed we were off again and during our trip we rode on a lot of different bicycle infrastructure and although there were definitely some good examples a lot of other bike lanes were not exactly ideal and it was interesting to get the stories from ston about why certain streets were built the way they were I regularly see people online saying that urban planners need to watch my videos so that they can learn what proper cycling infrastructure looks like but in my experience most urban planners know this stuff already they've attended presentations about bicycle infrastructure and they been on Study Tours to the Netherlands or Copenhagen the issue is not a lack of knowledge but a lack of funding a lack of political will and difficulty changing the procedures of municipalities that have spent decades building only four cars this means that there is a lot of bicycle infrastructure in Montreal that is experimental in order to build as much infrastructure as possible under the constraints of a historically car-centric City in some places a painted bicycle gutter is the only politically viable option but you can see where over time even these are being slowly improved this bicycle lane was recently widened and you can see where the previous line was scraped off when it's not financially feasible or politically viable to build permanent bicycle infrastructure Montreal will use Quick Build Solutions here is an example of a two-way bicycle path built with Flexi sticks and they constructed this temporary bicycle traffic light on blocks this needed to be built cheaply without changing the road design but it also needed to be robust enough to be hit by snowplow blades but these projects aren't always ideal and it's clear that there are still compromises being made when making space for bicycles like this bike path that weaves back and forth because of demand for outdoor restaurant seating or in this case where parking was removed but not for this electric car charging spot Montreal is also experimenting with proper rais bus stops that make it easier to board this allows people to wait for and board the bus without blocking the bicycle lane behind them these are only temporary but they're a good example of the proper infrastructure that Montreal is triing unfortunately there are no Dutch style protected intersections for cyclists which was a bit disappointing but it's not terribly surprising because these are pretty rare outside of the Netherlands even Copenhagen does not have protected intersections the city does have this one intersection that uses curves to protect cyclists in a similar way to a Dutch Junction this makes no sense on an intersection this small but I was told this was done part to test the concept in Montreal part of the reason why this rapid change is possible at all is that Montreal is governed very differently than most other Canadian cities the island is not actually one city but instead 19 Burrows and 15 cities that cooperate at various levels this means that any decision on local issues such as installing a bicycle lane or pedestrianized to be agreed on by the local burrow and not the entire city this is why in Montreal you will see neighborhoods like Plateau Montreal building out cycling infrastructure and safer Street designs much faster than many other Canadian cities one of these streets in the plateau called Pine Street even though it doesn't have any pine trees on it was recently redesigned and you can see the direction that Montreal is going with its new infrastructure it's a narrow two-way street with one lane in each direction for cars there's a buffer with trees between the street and the bicycle lane and the bike lane is pretty well designed with curb protection from Cars and another small curve up to the sidewalk you can see that this design is getting much closer to a proper Dutch style Street design there are a few quirks though these look like Dutch style continuous sidewalks but they're not they were intended to be proper raised Crossings but due to compromises in the implementation they ended up falling short of sidewalk level you can see how they dip down and aren't continuous at sidewalk level at all this is a good example of how difficult it is to change Decades of car Centric thinking at all levels of government but at least they're making progress some of these more recent Street designs provide a much better pedestrian experience than most us and Canadian cities too there are even some new Crossings like this one which are similar to The designs found in many cities in Europe you can see here how the road Narrows before the crossing and there's a refuge Island between the two car Lanes so that people walking only need to focus on traffic coming from One Direction at once I've been told that Montreal drivers often do not stop for pedestrians but at this Crossing almost all drivers stop proving once again that road safety is less about bad drivers and more about bad infrastructure these Crossings also make space for native trees and plants improving water absorption one other thing I really appreciate when walking in Montreal is that drivers are not allowed to turn right on red lights allowing drivers to turn right on red is insanely dangerous to pedestrians and this is something I've talked about in previous videos another great feature of Montreal is the green alleys these are Alleyways between houses that have been turned into places where kids can play with very low car speeds and lots of greenery these can be very easy to overlook but I managed to find them in many different neighborhoods in the city and of course there are also several public parks uh a lot of people told me I absolutely must check out the parks in Montreal but to be honest I'm not really sure why Montreal has several Parks but I wouldn't say any more or less impressive or more plentiful than in most other decent cities some are big and some are small and that's the parks of Montreal they have been doing a better job than other Canadian cities at removing cars though Toronto might want to take the hint and get the cars out of High Park but the absolute highlight of my trip was streets like these every summer Montreal pedestrianized about 10 streets but these aren't just short spans from Street to Street some of these are dozens of blocks long from from Strode to Strode I cannot stress just how unique this is in Canada or in the United States sure you might find a small pedestrianized street here or there in other cities in North America but nothing comes even close to the number and length of these streets in Montreal I saw people of all ages out enjoying themselves and waiting way too long to buy Bagels although they are great Bagels the streets were decorated with art and random quotes there were lots of temporary installations for seating Greenery and just fun things to do chairlifts on the street sure why not it was interesting to see that these pedestrianized streets still permitted cycling but inline skating and skateboarding was not allowed mopeds were also not permitted and this sign mentions a pickup service for the physically disabled and the elderly most cross streets still allowed cars through though and there were temporary ballards to direct traffic which led to some strange Ballard placement when surface parking lots needed to remain accessible some of the barriers were very solid While others were not which is how they allowed for necessary service vehicles to access these streets I think the city has done a great job at designing these given that everything is temporary and needs to be removed at the end of the summer it was great that I got to experience these pedestrianized streets while I was in Montreal I really enjoyed them so that was my trip to Montreal isn't this an amazing City wow and that's where this video could end in fact that's where almost all urbanist content about Montreal ends maybe there's some vague references about how the city isn't perfect it's still North America but that's about it so for the rest of this video i' I'd like to talk about some pretty major shortcomings I found during my time in Montreal things I haven't really seen mentioned in any other urbanist content so if you don't want to shatter your rosy image of Montreal you can pretend that the video is done right now I'd like to thank my supporters on nebula and patreon for financing my fantastic trip to the best city in North America you guys are the best have a great day okay I think they're gone let's get real first some context Montreal is on an island but that island is chopped up by highways and some of these highways cut right through the center of the city now there's nothing inherently wrong with highways there are great way to move vehicles from point to point B quickly and efficiently when highways are used correctly they divert traffic away from city streets and onto the highway but highways should go around cities not through them and the problems come when highways are used to funnel tens of thousands of cars onto city streets and that is exactly the way highways are misused in Montreal there were so many places where I found car sewers connected to highways this highway even has its own backup Highway next to it this was one thing I really noticed noticed about Montreal especially when cycling there are highways everywhere in some places they try to make it as safe as possible for people cycling which is great but it still amazed me just how much land on this island is dedicated to highways and related infrastructure these highways were built in the 1950s and 1960s when elevated expressways were all the rage but now they're crumbling and nobody wants to pay the billions of dollars required to repair them historically Montreal was an island of street cars look there were so many lines that they overflowed outside of the map this means that a large part of the island is one big street car suburb with medium density mixed use walkable neighborhoods of course all of these street car tracks were torn out to build car infrastructure in the 1950s and 60s and this is the source of most of the problems with Montreal today street cars or what sane countries call trams are extremely efficient for urban Transportation when you remove street cars from a street and turn the street over to only cars you significantly reduce the capacity of the street so if you had a lane that could move over 5,000 people per hour by street car you now have a lane that can only move around 1 or 2,000 people by car so what was once a humaniz slows speed walkable street with street cars becomes a Strode for high-speed car traffic with the only public transit being buses that get stuck in traffic instead of limiting streets to only local traffic and forcing through traffic to the many many any highways Montreal makes basically everything a through Street I did find a few modal filters around Montreal like this one and this one that prevents through traffic but these were rare and the vast majority of residential streets were through routes for cars this makes these streets a major source of car traffic what's even worse is that they make many of these streets multi-lane oneway streets multi-lane oneway streets are terrible for cities they are used in order to speed up car traffic which is exactly the opposite of what you want for livable neighborhoods a one-way Road like this should not exist downtown and although the bike lane is welld designed there's nothing on the other side so this guy is cycling on the sidewalk these oneway streets are also more dangerous to cross because there can't be pedestrian Islands these exist only because the speed of car traffic is more important than the safety of people walking in some places Montreal has been slowly improving some of these stroy former street car streets which is an improvement of course but a lot of these problems would be solved if they cut off through traffic push cars to the highway Network and put the street cars back however that is an extremely tough sell politically when there's been decades and Decades of car Centric development plus there won't be any money left after spending billions on propping up outdated highways anyway right now Montreal is missing out on one of the biggest benefits of good quality surface Transit Transit as a walking accelerator a way to get from one walkable area to another walkable area quickly and efficiently this really helps to connect walkable areas and makes them more accessible transit in Montreal is heavily focused on long-distance travel where stations are far apart and either underground like the Metro or elevated like the ram this makes short trips unnecessarily long because you have to go all the way down to the metro and all the way back up again just to get to your destination trams are much more convenient for short trips and they are the ideal walking accelerator but that's a topic for a future video I found the surface transit in Montreal to be pretty poor there are no trams anymore and the buses are slow schedules are very unreliable because buses are often stuck in traffic and stuck at red lights like why does this bus with dozens of people on it need to wait at this red light at all and the backwards ticketing system means that dwell times the time that Transit Vehicles spend at a stop are way too long it is insane how long this bus had to stop here to board four people this made it very annoying for me to explore Montreal's great walkable neighborhoods on foot I couldn't get from one area to another without waiting ages for a bus that would crawl along at a pace barely faster than walking now it felt to me like the bixie Bike Share is being used to fill the Gap as a walking accelerator and to make up for poor surface Transit unfortunately Bike Share is an inferior replacement to good surface Transit a tram can take anyone but Bike Share isn't useful if you can't cycle because you're carrying a bunch of things traveling with children or for any number of other reasons Bike Share is a cute idea when a small percentage of your population rides a bike as an easy way to get more people to cycle but it just doesn't work when the majority of people ride bicycles there's a reason why Amsterdam banned Bike Share back in 2017 and is only now reintroducing them in a very limited way despite it being the first city in the world to introduce the concept of Bike Share back in 1965 and having a docked system back in 1999 I cannot tell you how many times I was exhausted from walking in Montreal and found the nearest bixie docks completely empty because in order to function Bike Share needs a complex system of trucks that redistribute the bikes during the day and this just becomes more and more difficult as the system grows this is just not as scalable solution for mass transportation the destruction of the street car Network explains another major problem with Montreal when you exit many of the Metro stations you're dumped out of the S side of an absolutely terrible stro but this makes sense when you understand that these strods were all street car streets when the Metro was built they tore up the street cars and handed all the space over to cars so the area immediately outside of many Metro stations is one of the most inhospitable streets in the whole neighborhood again the valuable land surrounding a Transit stop is squandered in favor of wide roads and parking lots some of these locations are absurd like here where you're literally dropped off at the side of a highway entrance like come on seriously this is an insult to Transit Riders I stayed at a hotel in the heart of plateau monreal what is considered by most to have the best urbanism in the whole city so when I got off the Metro I was expecting some worldclass urbanism but when I exited the station I saw this I didn't even know what to make of this it's like the middle of the street has been dug out to save drivers a few seconds of traveling time and to be crystal clear this is not some far-flung suburb this is what you see literally as soon as you exit one of the major Metro stations in the plateau the neighborhood that literally everyone told me I had to visit Amsterdam has this one area bulldozed in the 1960s with a similar issue though the road and bike pass have a much safer design of course and I have complained about this road in multiple videos but I also made a video about how Amsterdam is trying to fix this as far as I can tell Montreal has no plans to change any of this I want you to understand that this is as much bad urbanism as this is good urbanism but there are dozens of videos and articles about this while nobody mentions this despite it being only a few blocks away now to be fair if I had exited at Mont Royale Station instead I would have been right in the middle of the most popular pedestrianized Street what a difference one Metro stop makes if there's one thing I learned about Montreal it's that good urbanis drops off really fast by North American Standards Montreal is building some great quality bicycle infrastructure and after riding for a few hours with ston I started feeling pretty good about riding a bike here but once I started venturing out on my own I realized just how fractured the network is and because I didn't know what routes were safe I ended up in a lot of places where it felt dangerous to cycle you might have a bike lane like this but then the only infrastructure becomes this one path which turns into an very narrow shared sidewalk next to high-speed traffic and next thing you know you're expected to navigate these insane Suburban intersections on your bike now to be fair to Montreal this is to be expected in any city that is recovering from being bulldozed for car infrastructure but I was still surprised just how much of a difference there was from burrow to burrow it became very clear that Montreal is building bike infrastructure not so much where it is needed but rather where it is politically acceptable to build this leads to some very strange infrastructure choices like there will be very high quality bicycle paths along pretty minor residential streets but then like absolutely nothing on major dangerous roads this was very strange to me because for example in the Netherlands or Denmark small residential streets usually have no bicycle infrastructure at all because they're quiet residential streets with 30 kmh speed limits and minimal car traffic while the expensive protected bike lanes are reserved for major roads with more cars and higher speed limits part of the problem is that almost all residential streets in Montreal are through streets so they have a lot of car traffic as I mentioned earlier and most residential streets are very wide with no traffic cing I found only a few streets with speed bumps though I did find this pretty wacky street naring with Flexi posts which slowed cars extremely well this really shows you just how much drivers slow down when the street is narrowed but for the most part residential streets had very high vehicle speeds which is why the city needs to over build the bicycle infrastructure in order to be safe even on streets like this but it means that the cycling budget gets spread very thin and there's no money or political will to build anything on the major roads for example I needed to cycle down this Strode but I didn't because it was too dangerous but just one block over was this protected bike lane on a tiny residential street so it's good that I was able to cycle here but this isn't where I wanted to be right I had to take these kind of detours regular when trying to get anywhere and it was very frustrating of course the problem with cycling on smaller streets in North America is the ridiculous number of stop signs sorry I mean aret signs thankfully Montreal cyclists ignore stop signs which they should because stop signs are stupid and should not be used in this way as I've talked about in a previous video but of course this is technically illegal and it means that any board cop looking to fill his quota can ticket you for it at any time I also noticed that a lot of the protected bike pass Montreal were two-way these are sometimes called bidirectional bike Lanes there's a reason why Traffic Engineers do this because putting the bike Lanes together lets them get a little bit of extra space for bikes without taking space away from cars and on multi-lane one-way streets car Lanes can be slightly closer together which also leaves a few extra centimeters to make bike Lanes wider again without taking space away from Cars uh but these kind of lanes can be dangerous in certain situations and probably should not be used on a street like this bidirectional cycling paths are not recommended on streets with a lot of cross streets and driveways as drivers are not expecting to look for traffic coming from the opposite direction this relatively minor intersection in Toronto is one of the most dangerous for cyclists in the whole city for exactly this reason this bidirectional path near the Waterfront in Montreal has long stretches between cross streets and this is a reasonable design though it does suddenly end with a walk your bike sign and this bidirectional path was recently removed and replaced with wider one-way bicycle paths on either side of the road which is a safer long-term solution I definitely felt like there were way too many cross streets on most of these two-way cycling paths though and without any protected intersections of course in some cases Montreal mitigates the danger of lots of cross streets by having a stoplight at emberry intersection which is really annoying I ran into so many red lights when cycling in Montreal which made cycling very slow but I generally prefer taking Transit over cycling anyway and while I was checking out the new REM trains I met up with these two guys who were in town doing the same thing bunch of Transit loving weirdos but beyond that there were three people I plan to meet up with in advance two in Montreal proper and one up here in valde all three of these places were difficult or impossible to reach by public transit even the two that are officially part of the city these two may become more accessible when the full REM system is completed though but like all Canadian cities it would definitely be a compromise to live in Montreal without owning a car inter city train service is very limited and even going to Toronto Canada's largest city there are only six trains per day not per hour per day at least they do have communauto a local car sharing program but since we weren't members we had to rent a car to get to VAV which was about as much fun as you'd expect it to be valved used to have a train station which is now now a cycling path that is quite well used but like almost all of these Rails to Trails projects in North America this would have more value if it were still a train station connected to Montreal outside of Montreal we encountered the same awful car dependent places like anywhere else in Canada but in the end we did meet up with this person I never ended up meeting up with this person as we couldn't make the timing work with public transit and as for this person we agreed to meet halfway he would drive and I would would take the subway we agreed to meet at the orange julip a classic Boomer era Burger Joint so I took the Metro out to namur station the station itself was opened in the 1980s and had some pretty interesting artwork neat but then I stepped outside holy I have taken public transit in literally hundreds of cities around the world and I have never in my life seen the area outside of a metro station that was this bad Harvey's may make your hamburger a beautiful thing but a Harvey's parking lot and a literal Highway entrance is not a beautiful thing to see when you exit a metro station to get to the restaurant less than 300 M away I had to cross a four-lane onewa road a six-lane highway and another four-lane oneway strad there were thousands of cars it was loud and polluted and that was an extremely uncomfortable place to be outside of a car it amazes me that this subway station has been open for 40 years and the land Ed surround it is still this bad and this is not the suburbs of Montreal this location is less than 7 km from downtown and well within the center of the island which is pretty wild I think you can understand what I mean when I say that good urbanism drops off really fast in Montreal but hey at least I got to eat in a restaurant shaped like an orange I mentioned earlier that Montreal is split into several political regions which gives them that sweet sweet local governance but the flip side is that there are many Burrows in cities which don't want to or can't build proper infrastructure and that's where a lot of these drastic differences come from if the bike lane suddenly ends it's probably CU you crossed into a new burrow or city I took a trip out to East Montreal and I could see the infrastructure getting worse every time I cross the border into a new burrow the streets out here are very wide and there are lots of cars and if there's any bike infrastructure at all it's pretty awful they do have more missing housing than most Canadian neighborhoods but it's still very very car Centric Transit service is pretty patchy here so I got stuck and ended up taking a taxi back to the city another independent city is West Mount despite being on the island and surrounded by Montreal West Mount is an English-speaking Enclave that's its own City with lots of large historic single family homes there's no subway station within West Mount but there are buses West Mount also has this nice bike path but I made the mistake of trying to ride down their main stro and it was not fun I decided it was safer to pull over and walk now not everyone in West m is insanely wealthy this poor guy is so hard up he needs to handwash his own Maserati and there are a few bike paths but for the most part it's kept pretty Car- Centric but it's still better than the neighboring Kota de who voted to remove a bike lane in 2020 and then hired Consultants to spend $150,000 on an exhaustive study to put it back just for the study like the entire project shouldn't cost that much so I guess the trick with Montreal is to live in a neighborhood that's wealthy enough to have people who will advocate for better Urban infrastructure while not being so so wealthy that they Advocate against it I also visited some of the suburbs of Montreal but they were not good they were pretty much exactly the same as everywhere else in Canada they do have these wacky horizontal traffic lights though and there is more missing middle housing than is typical outside of Quebec occasionally I found some multi-use paths that were decent but giant parking lots and giant strads are the norm here this is typical Canadian car dependent Suburbia I had to take several taxis because I got stranded by public transit and it was generally a waste of my time for example I made the mistake of trying to take an EXO train but I got stuck out in Suburbia at a train station with a highway on one side and a giant parking lot on the other silly me for thinking a regional train might you know go to the city during the day EXO is a typical commuter rail system that is basically only useful for suburbanites to come into the city for work I've made a previous video about these ridiculous systems so I won't expand on that further at first I thought maybe I could walk around for a bit and film The suburb but the Strode right outside the train station had no sidewalk and I wasn't willing to risk my life for more footage of shitty Canadian suburbs so again I took a taxi I was was impressed though that the metro station in the suburb of longay had a lot of buses going to it and there was a university right next to the Metro with some decent bike parking unfortunately the whole area is literally surrounded by highway interchanges so it's not much fun getting out of here on foot I was also surprised by what I didn't see in Montreal a common Trend in great cities are new neighborhoods that are being built to be nearly car-free from the start such as H Havens in Amsterdam Europa plots in Zurich or vanston in Oslo but even the new downtown neighborhoods I visited in Montreal were still being built to be very carf friendly this is really disappointing because it's locking in car Centric design for Generations there's a common situation that exists in North American cities that I call walkable Islands every city has some nice places that's not something unique you can paint a good picture of literally any City if you want if you pick the right spots even Fake London has wartle Village uh the temps Valley path uh this bicycle intersection and that one block of dund street but these good places are like Islands small pockets of good urbanism among a sea of strods Highways and parking lots we experienced this in Toronto where things were pretty good as long as we didn't leave our little walkable Island and I experienced the same thing in Montreal now to their credit their walkable islands are bigger than Toronto and there are probably more of them too but let's be clear those fantastic photos and videos you see from urbanists on YouTube and are taken on those walkable Islands my travels in Montreal were pretty consistent every time I went to one of the places recommended to me I was seriously impressed but every time I veered even slightly Off Script sometimes even just by a few blocks I regularly encountered terrible Urban places I stayed in two places in Montreal an apartment near downtown and a hotel in Plateau monreal when I got to my hotel I thought I had booked the wrong Place everybody told me that St Den in the plateau was one of the best streets in the city but it looked like this fortunately I realized I was just too far south the good stuff starts here now I'm not going to fault Montreal too much for this every city repairing bad car infrastructure will have some streets that have been fixed and others that have not still it was funny that two blocks north was this and two blocks south was one of the temporary pedestrianized streets while my hotel was on this Landing Strip still it did make me realize that Montreal was not as great as I've been led to believe even on the best Street in the best neighborhood in the city the other place I stayed was just around the corner from this street now this is really nice right there's this nice big sidewalk with trees and benches and this provided me with a lovely first impression of the city so I decided to go for a walk I walked one block South and this street was not so nice a wide oneway street with high-speed traffic it was undergoing construction though so maybe this will become a bicycle lane I also noticed that there is a lot of parking in Montreal if you can't find a spot on the street or in this surface parking lot don't worry there's a parking garage right here it was nice to see at least some of this turned into restaurant seating at least a short walk farther south though I hit this terrible Strode right through the center of downtown this definitely fits the definition of a car sewer where people on bicycles are squeezed between high-speed cars and the only Transit is buses stuck in traffic in other words a typical Canadian city okay one more block South with this nice little bump out for pedestrians to make safer Crossings not bad and here was a metro station but then I noticed this sign why were people walking and cycling not allowed on this side of the street and they're all forced to share this one dingy sidewalk when I got to the end I found out why this is a literal Highway entrance again this is not Suburbia this is right near the center of the city I pulled out my map to find the best way to get out of here this is not how I expected this walk to go I told my phone to take me to the train station assuming it must get better from here but it didn't downtown Montreal is awful it's full of Highway entrances and exits and giant strads and there are still several surface parking lots around too look at the size of this sign this doesn't belong in the middle of downtown this is one of those brilliant ideas right out of the 1960s bulldoze the downtown build a bunch of Highways and create a central business district for suburbanites and that is Downtown Montreal in a nutshell a place for suburbanites to come byy car there is no way in hell you would find me cycling on a stro like this it's such a shame because you can see some glimpses of the historical walkable City that used to be here before it was bulldozed to build garbage like this when I visit somewhere I try to get a realistic view of the whole city I don't just visit the highlights and call it a day of course this is the internet so I've still had people accuse me of cherry-picking I remember once laughing and saying what do you think if I just turned around there'd be some giant intersection of six lane strods or something so funny except that is literally the case in Downtown Montreal this is a nice little parket right but turn around and sure enough it's surrounded by six Lane strods now I haven't been to Calgary for a while but I could easily see this being the worst downtown of any major city in Canada the best part of downtown Montreal is definitely the old town with its historic buildings and cobblestone streets though it is quite a small part of downtown and still accessible by cars and to get there you need to cross this Death Star trench that cuts right through the city center but for me Old Montreal was depressing because the rest of downtown probably looked something like this before it was bulldozed there's also this enormous parking garage right by the Waterfront in Old Montreal which is owned by the provincial government not the city so it's not going anywhere anytime soon now downtown Montreal also has the Razo or underground city effectively an underground network of paths connecting adjacent buildings these exist in a lot of cities with cold weather such as the path in downtown Toronto or the plus 15 in downtown Calgary I am not really a fan of these and someday I should make a video about how these suck the life out of downtown streets a lot of these pedestrian networks were built in the 1960s and pitched as an escape from the cold but the primary motivation was to reduce the number of pedestrians on the street so that they didn't interfere with the flow of car traffic and personally I don't think it's a good idea to privatize your downtown and hand it over to a few large Property Owners these connected malls span over different skyscrapers owned by different owners so they are usually mazike and difficult to understand for infrequent visitors and tourists and you can see that outside of office hours this place is a dead zone these networks are usually only popular with office workers and apparently people who still listen to Metallica because of all the winding routes through changing in levels between buildings this underground mall would be extremely difficult to navigate in a wheelchair I had enough trouble just getting through it with a rolling suitcase you know what would be a great solution to this putting the shops back on the street I did get to the train station however now there's something I like to do in every city I visit and that's what I call the Hal bun Hof test because I got the idea in Hamburg when you exit the main train station are you safely and easily able to transfer to surface Transit like here in basil or are you immediately confronted by cars in high-speed traffic like here in Hamburg Montreal fails this test spectacularly the train station is effectively hidden it's surrounded by strods and almost impossible to find if you're not looking for it the main entrance is hidden down this smaller side street and when you go through the front entrance you get here a parking lot and a rental car pickup area I'm pretty sure this is the worst train station entrance I've ever seen especially since this is the only train station in Montreal all thankfully the new Ram station is accessible in the train station but it took me a while to find it because I didn't realize that an r with a line through it meant public transit I really don't understand why the REM had to be branded differently than the rest of the Metro it seems needlessly confusing now I wanted to take the metro back to my hotel and theoretically you can get the Metro from the train station but despite lots of signs for rental cars it's difficult to find the entrance to the Metro eventually I figured out that you walk down this escalator that isn't working down these stairs and around the corner through these doors and then turn right then down this hallway and another small set of stairs and then this escalator which also isn't working so go down the stairs a very long set of stairs then down this hallway and through these doors and the metro station is right here on the right you would really have to be trying to make this transfer any less convenient but here's where we get to the most insane part of the Montreal Metro the ticketing system most modern Metro systems use some kind of smart card in has the Opus card now on Most Metro systems you load money onto the card and it's deducted when you tap it and you can set up an auto top up to add money when you're running low even better contactless payments with a phone or credit card are available in many cities even Toronto does this now but Montreal is different here you don't load money you load individual tickets or passes and the only place you can do that is at a physical ticket machine this means that there are enormous ticket lines at every Metro station what's worse even if you have a weekly or monthly pass you need to load this using the machine so near the first of every month the lines are even longer and to make matters worse I found many ticket machines were out of order even this one at the brand new REM station and don't even get me started on how bad the land use is around the Suburban REM stations unfortunately that's pretty normal for Canadian Transit of course The Pedestrian I streets in Montreal were absolutely great but there are also important caveats here too these are only temporary the longest of them is open for about a third of the year but most of them are open for less than 15 weeks so if I had visited at almost any time of the year besides summer I would have missed them the argument here is winter which okay fine it doesn't stop Scandinavians from pedestrianized streets but Canadians do love to use winter as an excuse my issue is that because these are temporary a lot of compromises need to be made ultimately the street needs to turn back into a place for cars so this limits the design for example wheelchair users rightfully complain that the shops and patios would put displays or seating out that block the sidewalk so these ramps were installed this year to provide more places to go up and down from sidewalk level in a wheelchair this is a great Improvement of course but if this were a permanent implementation it could be designed properly so that there isn't any curb at all like you see in many pedestrianized areas in Europe and these Planters are nice and so is the temporary paint but ultimately it could be designed to be so much nicer if this were permanent a permanent Street could have proper loading areas and traffic diversions too right now having these flexi sticks everywhere is really ugly I feel like these pedestrian streets would be so much more impactful and useful if they were on10th the length but permanent but I assume this temporary situation is all Montreal can get away with politically and that's understandable and I don't want to be too negative here because again there's no other place in the country that has done a better job than this but the truth is the majority of Montreal is not like this it's more like this is this still better than most of the US in Canada yes absolutely and the city is definitely improving but I remember sitting on this bus as it's slowly trudge through traffic and I seriously considered titling this video the most disappointing City I've ever visited but that's not really fair to Montreal because my expectations were just set too high from what I had seen online and besides I was saving that title for Philadelphia I feel like Canadians have been gaslighting me about Montreal I've been repeatedly told it's just as good as the best European cities and there's lots of content online suggesting that too I'm sorry but these people are just wrong I spent a week in Montreal and I traveled extensively throughout the city and I saw a lot of great things and some very very promising improvements and I cannot stress enough how great these pedestrian streets are but I also spent over1 $ in taxis in a single day because public transit was so bad outside of the core region and I ended up in a lot of places where I didn't feel safe walking or cycling and spent a lot of time stuck in traffic even on public transit and all this and what I've been repeatedly told is one of the best cities in North America Montreal really made me lose interest in making any more videos about us or Canadian cities it's just not worth the time cost and frustration and ultimately I don't think Montreal is a great City it's more like five good neighborhoods in a trench coat pretending to be a great City but even I do have to admit it's still better and improving faster than other Canadian cities so it does have that going for it so if you're a Canadian who appreciates good urbanism someone who doesn't want to spend most of their waking hours surrounded by asphalt or behind the wheel of a car someone who appreciates humanized places and if you're able to find a way to live and work in one of the great walkable Islands then you could really carve out a great life for yourself here in Montreal just um don't walk too blocks south the cycling infrastructure though not perfect was definitely one of the better parts of Montreal I did a lot of cycling while I was there and I only showed a small part of that in this video so if you'd like to see more I actually have a whole other video with commentary on the rides that I did in Montreal and it's available now on nebula nebula is the subscription streaming service for educational creators I release all of my YouTube videos to nebula early and you can watch them without any ads or sponsorships and there are over 150 other creators who are also on nebula many of whom you probably already watch today one of the most important parts to me about nebula is how we're funded we're not supported by ads so your viewing will never be interrupted by an ad break we're also not funded by Venture capitalists who would inevitably entify the platform as they extracted the most profit from users instead nebula is supported by you the fans who subscribe each month to watch great content you can also watch nebula Originals exclusive content made possible only through funding from nebula like Abigail Thorn's recent stage play the prince a project funded by nebula if you didn't get a chance to see it while it was playing in London or New York then you can watch it now on nebula nebula wants to fund more great original content so for a limited time nebula is offering lifetime memberships for a single payment of $300 you have permanent access as long as you and nebula exist a lifetime membership is the best way to support nebula to fund new content and to support the development of new features for the platform but if that's too much for you that's fine nebula also has monthly and annual memberships if you sign up using the link go. nebula.jpg relevant links below this video

Channel: Not Just Bikes

Views: 1,496,660

Keywords: urban planning, montreal, canada, public transit, public transportation, cycling, pedestrianization

Id: _yDtLv-7xZ4

Length: 51min 29sec (3089 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023