Dear STM, BIKE RACKS ON BUSES please!!
I've been asking around as to why the STM doesn't have bike racks, and a lot of the reasons I was told sounded more like excuses to me. The four i've heard the most are:
-Not enough room in garages
-Drivers' view being obstructed
-Narrow lanes on the older streets
-Costs 1000$ to install per bus
These are not genuine reasons, to me, they sound like excuses. Here's why:
-Not enough room in garages - What do you mean? A folded rack takes up an extra what, 6 inches? The way they park their buses in individual spots rather than stacking them like trains (as seen on satellite images and street view) means that they can get away with fitting each bus with a bike rack. First excuse, BUSTED.
-Driver's view being obstructed - What? What? It's not like this hasn't been tried before. Buses across the continent have fitted racks, and the bus drivers don't seem to have any obstruction issues. Even if the drivers here in MTL make the excuse that they don't drive New Flyer buses or whatever, guess what! In far away Laval, which uses the EXACT SAME buses as MTL, HAS ALL THEIR BUSES FITTED WITH BIKE RACKS!!! I don't get it - does Montreal have some sort of disease that infects bus drivers' line of sight, but it never reached Laval? Second excuse, BUSTED.
-Narrow lanes on the older streets - I assume that this is a reference to the streets of Old Montreal, which are narrower. However, they are so narrow that they can't even fit ANY buses, with or without bike racks. As far as I know, only 2 bus lines pass through Old Town - 50 and 55, the former of which goes around Old Town, and the latter of which stops short of Old Town at Champ-de-Mars metro. Line 50 especially would be a great line for bike racks, since it ends at an elevation much higher than any nearby metro stations and would prevent users from having to bike up such a steep hill (line 50 also doesn't have great frequencies but that's a story for another day). Anyway, most roads in Montreal have highway-sized lanes, because, you know, North America. Third excuse, BUSTED.
-Costs 1000$ to install per bus - I'm not sure if that's the exact cost, that's just an estimate. The STM has an annual budget of $1.8 billion and close to 2000 buses. If the STM were to fit all their buses with racks, it would cost them a total of $2 million (which is a very conservative number because they already have some buses that are fitted with racks), which is just over 1% of their annual budget. Fourth excuse, BUSTED.
Montreal is a very bike-friendly city, with hundreds of kilometres of high-quality bike paths, Bixi, and an overall very liberal bike culture. How is it that other cities, with less cyclists overall, have most (or all) of their buses fitted with bike racks? For me, this isn't about doing a bike/bus combo from the plateau to downtown. I get it, that's time-consuming. But this stupid system means that I can't even, for example, take my bike on line 68 from the new AAO REM station to the beach at Cap-St-Jacques, a distance I don't really want to walk. I just...I don't get it. What's going on here? Why is it like this?