Since outgoing Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante entered office in 2017, the city’s cycling network has grown by 35 per cent, adding 280 kilometres.
Montreal currently has 1,082 kilometres of bike paths.
Some Montrealers are saying there might be too many bike lanes — and some mayoral candidates are attempting to use frustration with cycling infrastructure to their advantage.
But in 2025, when many voters are concerned about climate change, bikes versus cars is a false dichotomy.
That also explains why candidates’ stances on bike paths don’t greatly differ from each other.
Before diving into the five mayoral hopefuls’ cycling-related campaign promises, here’s an overview of how bike paths affect on-street parking and businesses.
In short, yes.
That’s just one of the costs and benefits to consider as a society seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, said Kevin Manaugh, an associate professor at McGill University’s geography department.
“If we want healthier cities, happier cities and less polluting cities, we need to make these tough choices about building bike lanes, even if that sometimes does mean removing some car parking,” Manaugh said.
The fact remains that there’s a shortage of public roadway — for all commuters.
Of all Montreal roadway, only 2.3 per cent of space is allocated to bike infrastructure compared to 97.68 per cent of space set aside for cars, according to a 2025 study by McGill University’s Platial Analysis Lab.
The study also suggests the amount of bike paths in the Plateau-Mont-Royal and Rosemont—La-Petite-Patrie, boroughs that have some of the highest proportion of bike infrastructure on the island, is insufficient for safe and comfortable travel to meet the high demand.
Removing the space for bike lanes in Montreal would have a negligible impact on reducing traffic overall, argues David Beitel, the data services lead at Eco-Counter — a company that measures cycling and pedestrian trends in major North American and European cities.
“A parked car taking up the space that it does in our cities that become denser and denser is not an incredibly efficient use of that space,” Beitel said. “That’s why there isn’t parking on a lot of major arterials that bring us into our downtown.”
Beitel noted that in 2024, four Montreal intersections each had over a million bike counts in a year, according to data from Eco-Counter and the City of Montreal. That translates to more than 3,000 counts on average per day, he said.
“We saw examples on St-Denis [Street] … 1,700 cyclists using those bike facilities in a single hour,” Beitel said. “You can’t move that many cars on a vehicle lane in an hour.”
There are currently between 475,000 and 515,000 parking spots across Montreal, according to a spokesperson for the city.
Between September 2018 and September 2022, Montreal repurposed 5,834 on-street parking spots — the equivalent of one per cent of existing parking spots — to make shared roads safer for pedestrians as well as develop the Réseau Express Vélo (REV), the spokesperson said in an email.
But for voters whose transportation options are limited to cars, belabouring utilitarian arguments about climate action without offering practical alternatives won’t make the shift to cycling easy.
In 2021, researchers at University of California, Davis, reviewed 23 studies on how bike paths in other cities in Canada and the U.S. affected businesses.
They found that improved bike infrastructure generally has a positive or non-significant economic impact on retail and food services. But it could negatively impact car-centric businesses, like auto-repair shops or large home-goods stores.
For Montreal business owners whose stores might become less accessible due to construction, the long-term payoff of bike paths might be hard to swallow.
In Ahuntsic-Cartierville where work on the REV is ongoing, André Savoie — owner of Salaison Saint-André butcher shop on Henri-Bourassa Boulevard — said he fought to keep three parking spaces near his store for clients who often drive.
“The somewhat older clients, 75 years old and up, who came for a lot of homemade dishes — well, we lost them,” Savoie said.
His reaction is familiar to SDC St-Denis executive director Pauline Béchu who said that prior to St-Denis Street’s redevelopment for the REV in 2020, “people were pretty mad.”
But shop owners have come around after “seeing that the REV has had a positive impact on the economy of the street,” Béchu said.
“The perception of the street now is it’s a more welcoming place,” she said, noting that St-Denis Street boasts a commercial occupancy rate of 87 per cent — up from 75 per cent in 2019.
These days, she said store owners have a new request: more bicycle stations to convert cyclists into customers.
So far, mayoral candidates have either promised to develop the city’s cycling network or have diplomatically proposed to reassess existing bike paths before making commitments to build more.
Even Ensemble Montréal Leader Soraya Martinez Ferrada — who is campaigning on temporarily halting bike path construction — found it necessary to state during an interview with Radio-Canada’s Téléjournal on Tuesday that she is “pro-bikes.”
Martinez Ferrada has said that if elected, she would order an audit on bike paths within the first 100 days of her mandate to determine which paths should be maintained or removed.
Projet Montréal Leader Luc Rabouin, Plante’s successor, promised that if elected, he would increase access to Montreal’s bicycle-sharing service, so that by the end of a first mandate all Montrealers would live within 15 minutes on foot from a Bixi station.
That would entail adding 1,000 Bixi stations over the next four years, according to Projet Montréal.
For Transition Montréal Leader Craig Sauvé — a former Projet Montréal councillor — bike paths are a “matter of public safety and public health.” He plans to introduce baby seats for Bixi bikes and make more electric-assist bikes available to improve the cycling network.
Who wants to be the next Montreal mayor?
Jean-François Kacou, leader of Futur Montréal, said that if elected, he would impose a freeze on the construction of bike paths on commercial arteries and limit bike paths to residential streets, green corridors and parks — a plan he claims would improve safety.
Gilbert Thibodeau, leader of Action Montréal, was more explicit.
The mayoral candidate, who is running for the third time, has committed to increasing on-street parking and said he would “remove or adjust” bike paths that hinder traffic flow or take away from essential parking.
