Quote:
Originally Posted by Kilgore Trout
Yeah, it's weird. Toronto is not a particularly pleasant city to cycle in, and yet lots of people do it, because it's so convenient. Vancouver is a pretty nice city for riding a bike and yet it seems limited to a certain subset of the population.
Or maybe it has to do with the overall culture of the city? People in Vancouver just don't seem to go out as much as they do in Toronto or Montreal. It often feels like a city of homebodies.
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Could be where you cycled/when you cycled and the variable nature of individual perception?
In East Van I’ve seen cyclists from every subset. Along the seawall and other more ‘touristy’ routes you’re likely see a smaller subset, and not people doing everyday chores or commutes.
Too lazy to find all the stats, but what I did come across in a quick Google search, shows that in 2017 Vancouver’s Burrard Street bridge was the busiest route in North America where there was an an Eco-counter sensor with an average of
3,100 per day.
Source
Mind you those stats are old, and to be honest I’d be shocked if there wasn’t a Vancouver route approaching a daily average of 7,000 in 2022.
As for Montreal - from a June 4, 2022 CBC article, “ Around
2,000 cyclists a day, he said, use a recently constructed bike lane on St-Denis Street, a major artery in Montreal's urban core. "There's some days when it's 8,000, which is impressive."
Source
Again, I’d be surprised if there isn’t a route that is far above an average of 2,000 cyclists in Montreal - there must be busier routes than St-Denis?
Victoria has an extensive automated counter network (and yes, the number of routes coming into downtown is less than Montreal, but the population of greater Victoria is also 10 x less than Montreal.
Daily average from January 1 to August 14, 2022 for Victoria is
2,141 cyclists at the busiest checkpoint - with three other checkpoints at basically the same number. You can check out the 28 counters at the site below, just remember to untick ‘pedestrians’ so they’re not included in the count.
Source
Edit - thanks for sharing those maps MonkeyRonin - fascinating.