Abstract Manager

As cities across Canada are investing to expand their cycling infrastructure network, understanding their impact is an important step to fostering better transportation policy. The city of Montreal is one of those cities leading the way, having substantially increased both the length and the quality of its network over the last few years. Using The Canadian Bikeway Comfort and Safety (Can-BICS) dataset (Winters, 2020), we estimate that 88 km (+43 %) of low comfort (e.g., unprotected bike lanes), 7 km (+ 7 %) of medium comfort (multiuse path) and 175 km (+ 122 %) of high comfort (e.g., protected cycle track) has been added between 2018 and 2023 to the City of Montréal network. Various data sources suggest that these investments are paying off. For example, cycling volumes measured using the Montreal public counter data are repeatedly reported in the media as increasing year after year (e.g., LaPresse, 2022). The number of bikesharing (BIXI) trips are also following an impressive upward trend (BIXI, 2024). Finally, recent highlights from the 2023 Montreal Origin-Destination survey (ARTM, 2024) indicate an increase of 31 % in active travel trips since 2018 and a 4 % increase in modal share across the metropolitan region. While informative, these data do not allow an in-depth investigation of how new or improved cycling infrastructure influences people’s cycling behaviour and perception of cycling. Does infrastructure improvement attract new cyclists? Do current cyclists travel more? Do people feel safer cycling? Are people feeling more ready and open to adopt cycling for transport?

To fill this gap, a longitudinal two-wave survey was designed by our research team. A representative sample of 1250 respondents from the cities of Montréal and Laval were recruited via Léger’s web panel in October 2023. The same respondents were recontacted for a follow-up survey in October 2024, achieving a return rate of 55%. Questions were asked about travel behaviour, cycling stage-of-change (a measure that combines current cycling behaviour, intentions and readiness to change), perceived barriers, attitudes and norms towards cycling, and sociodemographics and postal codes. The spatialized survey data were combined with cycling infrastructure datasets from September 2023 and 2024 to investigate the impact of proximity to improved or new cycling infrastructure on people’s behaviour, attitudes and cycling stage-of-change. The findings shed light on how different people respond to new cycling infrastructure in their neighbourhood and shows the importance of capturing attitudes in addition to behaviour.