Having just been on a several-city urban vacation (I still have yet to post my NYC photos and a full write-up on my blog but I'll get around to it soon here), I have a few different thoughts on cycling.
First of all, one of the neatest things I saw were bike rental stations in Montreal. Not sure entirely how it works but the gist of it is that you go to each of the locations (which are literally all over the island) and you can rent a bike for a base time of 30 minutes and/or add time in increments of 15 minutes. To end your time you simply put the bike back on the rack where it gets locked up until the next person comes along.
One thought on this... it seems a lot more useful if you take out the consideration of people carrying bike helmets around with them, so you can just swipe your card, hop on a bike, and go. With that said, I saw a lot of empty bike racks, implying that the system is well used.
Of course, what are rental stations without proper lanes to use the bikes on. Montreal, of course, has many recreational paths such as the ones up on Parc Mont Royal that have the same mixed ped/bike movement and 20km/hr that Calgary pathways do. On many of its roads however, it has marked bike lanes that are placed on one side of the street.
Ex. Bike lanes with no separation from traffic via median
Ex. Bike lane w/ rental station
Ex. Bikers on lane separated from automobile traffic by concrete median
Several metro stations also have a large number of bike racks as well. This one at Station Mont Royal had a bike rack stretching down the block. It's a very busy station, and has an tiny, open-air market set up in front of the station entrance. Not entirely sterilized either... there were several homeless people sleeping in the park and one was urinating only feet away from groups of teens. That doesn't seem to scare people away or keep them from dropping their bikes off though.
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