This is Calgary, Alberta, home to the world’s largest outdoor rodeo and the biggest concentration of oil and gas companies in Canada. Its sister city to the north is Edmonton, whose hockey team is appropriately called “the Oilers”. Would you believe us if we said that the two big cities in Alberta — a province associated with cowboys and oil — are more “urbanist” than you thought? Would you believe that this is actual, verified footage from Edmonton? In this video we’re going to cover the underappreciated urbanism of Canada’s fifth and sixth biggest metro areas and talk about the fundamental challenge for urbanism in a place like this.

When people hear Calgary and Edmonton they typically think of low-density suburbs sprawling into the vast unobstructed openness of the Canadian prairies, but these two cities are actually denser than you’d expect for North America, especially given their populations. Calgary has a population of 1.3 million in the built-up urban and suburban parts of the city, while Edmonton is a bit smaller. The six most comparable cities in the US by population are Milwaukee, Providence, Jacksonville, Salt Lake City, Nashville, and Raleigh. If we look at how much land these cities take up — developed area, not city boundaries or metro area — there’s a stark difference between Calgary, Edmonton, and Salt Lake City versus the other US cities, which take roughly twice as much land for the same population. We could talk about the high-rises in Calgary or the new townhouses in Edmonton but a big difference is in the suburbs. Here’s a typical neighbourhood on the edge of Calgary. Nashville has variation but a lot of its suburbs look like this.

Calgary on the left is dense enough that you wonder why they didn’t just build townhouses while suburban Nashville feels almost rural. Same thing with the suburban edge of Edmonton versus Providence or Jacksonville or Milwaukee. This isn’t entirely a Canada versus US thing because many parts of the US (like Salt Lake City) have more compact suburbs too.

Calgary and Edmonton also punch above their weight in transit ridership. Both have successful light rail systems with ridership numbers comparable to bigger systems in much bigger cities. In the 70s, Edmonton realized it couldn’t afford to build highways through downtown and instead decided to build transit. Modeling the system to a large extent on Frankfurt, Germany, with construction and operations lessons from Philadelphia and Cleveland, Edmonton built North America’s first modern LRT system. Today it sees about 85,000 trips per day, which is actually higher than Portland’s MAX and San Francisco’s Muni Metro, both longer light rail systems. Calgary’s LRT came a few years later and is an even bigger overperformer, carrying an impressive 265,000 people per day by the end of 2023, making it the most-used light rail system in the US and Canada. That ridership is actually higher than Muni Metro (San Francisco’s light rail) combined with BART (the Bay Area’s rapid transit, regional rail hybrid), even though those systems together are substantially longer and serve a much more populated metro area. Why do Alberta’s light rail systems perform so well? It helps that the cities aren’t quite as spread out as people think, but also the service is pretty good. Trains come every 3 to 6 minutes during rush hour, depending on the city and line, with frequencies no lower than every 15 minutes off peak. Trains are also pretty fast, receiving signal priority and even crossing gates when they have to interact with cars. Like many other LRT and metro systems in Canada, they also drive a lot of ridership from strong bus connections. Calgary has four bus rapid transit lines too although the off-peak frequencies in particular leave a lot to be desired. Both cities have some key destinations like stadiums served by rail and Calgary in particular drives a lot of ridership from a high concentration of jobs downtown without enough parking for everyone. It’s a strange, strange world when the oil industry office jobs of Calgary are more concentrated in downtown, transit-accessible locations than the tech industry of the Bay Area, which likes its sprawling suburban office parks far from transit.

Both Calgary and Edmonton have the problem of a commuter-focused downtown that can feel dead and sometimes sketchy after hours. Edmonton’s downtown definitely fills up for hockey games though and we saw Chinook Blast, a winter festival in Calgary, with skating, music, and dragon fire. Calgary has a pedestrian street downtown where we were surprised to see a cargo bike within the first five minutes of leaving our hotel. One street over from Calgary’s pedestrian street is its transit mall. Instead of tunneling its LRT through downtown like Edmonton, Calgary decided to save money by dedicating a downtown street to transit. It’s not exactly a pedestrian destination but it’s a lot more pleasant than the wide streets dedicated to cars and it’s great for visibility of transit because the volume of trains is very high. Maybe Toronto can learn a thing or two for King Street? Maybe one of these vehicle traps? Edmonton is actually trying the surface route through downtown approach with its new Valley Line and the street transformation is really impressive, going from five lanes for cars to just one car lane between the train tracks and a bike corridor, although only part of the corridor is done, and as we encountered, there are disadvantages to street-running trains too. Both cities have a lot of extremely wide roads through their downtown, which are pretty unpleasant, although wide roads are easier to retrofit for cyclists and transit than the large highways that go through a lot of other cities’ downtowns, which Calgary and Edmonton were lucky enough to avoid. Calgary also has the “plus 15” system of walkways between buildings. It gets criticized for taking away from street life and we get the concern but it’s also understandable in a cold climate and not that different from underground systems in other cities. At least the plus 15 system gives people access to sunlight, versus the underground systems that don’t.

We had a fun time exploring some of the older, more urban neighbourhoods outside of downtown like Strathcona in Edmonton and Kensington and the Beltline in Calgary, which had a cool mix of housing and were pretty lively, especially with the unseasonably warm weather hovering around five degrees above freezing in February. While biking around in this mild European winter weather on a pair of Dutch bikes we came across this very unexpected strip mall in Edmonton.

Architects usually don’t like copying styles from other places like this, seeing it as inauthentic, but we found it fun and unique. It’s nice when cities try crazy things and see how they work out. Apparently it’s become something of an Instagram destination. We just wish the parking was less prominent and that it wasn’t named “Manchester Square” when it’s clearly Dutch, not British, inspired. We’re told it’s a reference to “Manchester” being an old name for the neighbourhood, but it still feels like a disconnect. Despite the large parking lot, it is very accessible by bike though.

We spent more time on a bike in Edmonton than we did in Calgary so we can speak more to the experience there but we were actually decently impressed. Lots of routes were labeled for winter priority clearing and many of them went through parks that broke up the road network and acted like traffic filters. We saw progress on one corridor, 132nd Avenue, that’s undergoing a major 5-year overhaul of the street that will include one of the nicest bike corridors on the continent. To be clear though, the bike networks in both Calgary and Edmonton are still in their infancy. We’re talking about pockets of bike-friendliness rather than a built-out system that can consistently and predictably move people around the city like the transit networks do. There are tons of gaps in coverage and we saw lots of people biking on the sidewalk. Edmonton in particular is actively improving here though, with a $100-million investment into bike infrastructure over the next few years. Outside of the on-street corridors, both cities reminded us of Ottawa in that they rely on the river recreational pathway system to fill in some of the gaps. That typically means great quality pathways with less than ideal routes, especially for transportation. The river valleys are amazing for views of the downtown skyline though, where both cities punch above their weight. We think Calgary’s skyline is better overall but Edmonton does have the tallest building in Canada outside of Toronto.

Overall, we found these two Albertan cities to be underrated, given their reputations and the comparisons with the sprawliest US cities. Even people from these two places often don’t realize that they punch above their weight on things like transit ridership. At the same time, their reputations don’t come from nowhere. Both cities experienced the vast majority of their development in the post-war suburban era. These are car-centric cities that made the geometrically practical and fiscally prudent decision to get commuters downtown by trains fed by buses rather than destroying large parts of their downtowns with highways. That’s great, but it doesn’t mean they’ve oriented other parts of city life around transit, walking, or cycling necessarily. Even if you can take transit to work, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to want a car for other destinations unless you live in a few central neighbourhoods, and even then. We talked to lots of people who moved there from other cities and nearly all ended up buying at least one car for their household.

Fundamentally the biggest challenge for (or limitation on) urbanism here is that any good density, walkability, or transit that you find feels like a bubble. Partly this is just being a mid-sized North American city where the most walkable neighbourhoods just don’t feel that big: geographically, culturally, or politically. We felt the same thing in Ottawa. But another part is being on the vast Canadian prairies where every other sense of “city life” is really far away. In Ottawa you can take the train to Montreal in two hours or Toronto in five. In Edmonton the closest “big city” is Vancouver, a 33-hour train ride with two trains per week. Calgary doesn’t have any passenger train connections at all. Sure, you can fly, but the point is that these two cities — especially the parts that are the most walkable and transit-accessible — are islands of urbanism in a vast region that is very rural and very spread out. The idea that “North America isn’t Europe!” often comes up and it’s places like the Prairies that really make you think: yeah, in some ways North America really isn’t Europe. High-speed rail has been proposed between Calgary and Edmonton: it might very well be viable, especially when you consider how fast these cities are growing. But it would still be a single line between two cities, without any of the connections and network effects that you get from denser rail networks in Europe or even the northeast corridor in the US. That reduces the usefulness and ridership potential but also the political support. Why would someone near Lloydminster want their tax dollars going towards high-speed rail connecting the big cities?

The challenges to urbanism here are as much cultural and political as practical. The Prairies feel like they have a very sharp urban/rural divide where once you go outside the cities, things turn very rural very fast and stay that way, with hundreds or thousands of kilometres of sparse settlements where people understandably feel an attachment to cars. Cars are important in rural areas in every developed country but in a lot of European countries even a farm might be within cycling distance of a dense town that has a train or at least a bus that gets you into a city. You rely on a car for lots of things but transit and density aren’t alien to you. The difference between cities and rural areas feels more extreme in a place like Canada, especially the wide open Prairies. You have a lot of people in rural areas or small cities or even the outer areas of bigger cities who might have never used public transit in their lives. They’re more likely to see investments into transit or cycling as irrelevant to them, out-of-touch with the needs of everyday people, or even a sinister attack on their way of life. These attitudes exist everywhere but they’re going to be stronger in more spread-out regions. And the elephant in the room is that the oil and gas sector makes up more than 20% of Alberta’s economy. Those anti-urban attitudes are supercharged in a region where a lot of people’s livelihoods rely, directly or indirectly, on fossil fuels. Redesigning streets and investing in public transit can come across not just as a threat to how you get around but also how you feed your family and pay your mortgage. From our perspective, the fundamental challenge of Prairie urbanism is fighting for things like density, walkability, and transit in a cultural and political environment that can be very unfriendly to cities and city things.

It’s no surprise that Alberta has been a hotspot for protests and controversy over conspiratorial interpretations of 15-minute cities, where people apparently fear that they will be locked into their neighbourhood through an elaborate system of fines and permits. A poll last year found that Alberta was the region of Canada most likely to have heard of 15-minute cities and least likely to support the concept. One petition with more than 3,000 signatures highlighted a worry that rural dwellers won’t be able to come into the city for the market. That backlash hasn’t affected any policy as far as we can tell but it’s responses like this that make it harder, culturally and politically, to build cities that prioritize people over cars. See another Prairie city: Winnipeg, whose main intersection downtown has been closed to pedestrians for decades in order to keep high traffic flow. Downtown residents favoured opening it in a 2018 referendum but they were overridden by the suburbs and rural outskirts. It’s harder to build people-friendly urban neighbourhoods when you can be overruled by the more numerous car-centric suburbs and rural areas who see your neighbourhoods mainly as a place to drive through. (Six years later in 2024, Winnipeg city council actually voted to open the intersection anyway, but because the underpass system is becoming too expensive to repair, not necessarily out of any care for pedestrians.)

One final thing: the fact that Calgary and Edmonton are denser than you think is interesting but it doesn’t mean they’re meeting housing demand. Calgary in particular has a problem: their housing is about 50% more expensive than Edmonton and they’ve been slower to enact zoning reform. A claiming that it would “ruin” their neighbourhood. The new multi-family housing wouldn’t be “affordable” enough at the same time that it would “threaten” the value of their home. You can find these contradictory and exclusionary attitudes in every city but Edmonton has done a better job of side-stepping them even though Calgary’s housing affordability problem is more acute, which means that Calgary actually should have been faster and more ambitious on reform.

We had a pretty great time in Alberta, thanks to invitations from the Winter Cycling Congress in Edmonton as well as More Neighbours Calgary and Strong Towns Calgary, not to mention the unseasonably warm weather that allowed us to spend a lot of time exploring around and filming. Calgary and Edmonton are interesting because they punch above their weight in things like transit and even density while existing in an environment, the vast Canadian prairies, that can be quite challenging (culturally, politically, and practically) to things like density, transit, and city life.

Vancouver is maybe the biggest housing affordability disaster in North America, at least when you consider that incomes are lower than US cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. Buying an average home takes up more than 100% of the median household income, which is less affordable than any Canadian city has ever been, according to one of the major banks. Buying a home is limited to a select few high-income earners or people with generational wealth.  Other cities in British Columbia like Victoria and Kelowna have pretty big housing problems of their own. Last year, 70,000 people left BC, mostly to Alberta. A housing crisis this bad deservescitya serious response. Fortunately, over the past year, the government of BC just decided to become the most ambitious province or state in North America on housing reform.

Single-family zoning? Gone. Municipalities are required to allow multiplexes everywhere, with three-to-six units based on the lot and proximity to a bus stop. Transit hubs? Upzoned, with eight to 20 storey apartments allowed by default near SkyTrain stations, depending on proximity, with density near bus exchanges too. Public hearings on new developments? Eliminated for projects that are consistent with the municipality’s official community plan. Public input is shifted towards big picture plans instead of questioning individual projects. They also added regulations on short-term rentals, implemented a speculation and vacancy tax a few years ago, funded Indigenous housing, and set up a provincial agency to finance and speed up construction of non-profit housing for middle-income families, along the model of Vienna and Singapore. BC’s housing skeptics responded to many of these reforms as you’d expect: an “unprecedented act of provincial overreach” to get rid of rules mandating single-family homes. “Open[ing] the floodgates for more unaffordable market housing development” to allow private developers to build more housing. Housing advocates, on the other hand, were enthusiastic, with lots asking: “how do I get this in my jurisdiction?”. Let’s talk to BC Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon.

What’s the argument for the province stepping in on housing reform, when people are used to housing decisions being made at the local level?

“Well, I would say that it’s not necessarily an argument. It’s just that the way we’ve been doing housing is simply not working.” – Ravi Kahlon

Yeah… we can confirm that.

“You know, often I heard from local governments when I said to them, ‘Hey, why don’t we allow for three or four units or single family lots?’ They say, ‘Hey, well, we’re looking to do this, but every time I do this, the neighbor, my neighbors or the people live by neighbors said, well, why are we doing it? Why are the others not doing it? Why do we have to take growth on and nobody else has to?’” – Ravi Kahlon

That point is important. Even a sympathetic politician or citizen who’s happy to welcome their fair share of housing might be hesitant to go full-YIMBY in their neighbourhood or city if it means taking on an unnatural amount of change due to other places shirking their responsibility. Handling housing at a higher level, like the province, means that we can all sign up for new housing at the same time to both spread the housing around but also reach a scale of new construction that can actually move the needle on the housing shortage.

“It’s a coordination problem. And the reality is I got a lot of respect for people who serve in local government, but all they hear is the voice of people who are already in the community who have homes that perhaps want to protect their home or their investment or don’t want it to change. And who’s speaking for the people who don’t have housing, who don’t have time to come to public hearings, who are busy working.” – Ravi Kahlon

In designing their reforms they learned lessons from other jurisdictions in North America, plus some international housing successes.

“We’re looking carefully at what California has been doing. I met with Scott Weiner, the senator from San Fran, we’re looking at Oregon, looking at Washington state, Minnesota.” – Ravi Kahlon

“But now we’re also investing in middle income housing, learning from Vienna, learning from Singapore, using government lands to build housing for middle income earners.” – Ravi Kahlon

So why exactly has BC been more ambitious than other jurisdictions in North America?

“It helps having a lot of young elected officials. Many of us, the Premier in particular, many of our peers can’t own a home or are renting or are struggling to find places. And when you have live in an environment where you’re surrounded by people who are struggling for housing,I think that actually drives you to make the changes that have been long overdue.” – Ravi Kahlon

One of the biggest challenges with province-level reforms is that municipalities often fight them with extra rules related to parking or yard space or who’s allowed to live in the new housing. These “poison pills” leave the new housing technically legal but in practice difficult to build.

“We are not naive to believe that there will not be some new roadblocks being put in place, but we tried to address that in the legislation’s pieces that we brought forward. For example, when we said we’re going to allow three or four units (or six where there’s frequent transit) on single family lots, we released a site standard document that addressed parking, addressed heights, addressed setbacks. And we did that because local governments have until June 1st to change their community plans to change their zoning to allow this type of housing. And if they don’t, our site standard will be their site standard. So we put those pieces in place to ensure there was a backdrop that anyone that doesn’t make the changes knows that change is coming, and our rules will be their rules.” – Ravi Kahlon

So they’re heavily encouraging municipalities to adopt rules that make new housing actually feasible to build.

“And if they don’t, what they’re going to start seeing is proponents, not for profits or for profit developers or builders are going to start challenging their OCPs and their bylaws in court. And they will have our legislation as a backstop.” – Ravi Kahlon

One thing that comes to mind is Vancouver’s multiplex policy. They legalized small-scale density (up to six units) before the big BC housing reforms, but they didn’t allow the actual buildings to be much bigger than single-family homes in terms of floor space, contrary to new provincial guidelines. That makes them less practical to build, even if technically they’re legal.

“I met with the mayor and shared with him that it is certainly my expectation that Vancouver will align to our site standards and, and maybe even beyond that because there’s real opportunities for us to build housing in Vancouver in particular.Our goal was to raise the floor but not set the ceiling.” – Ravi Kahlon

If there’s one gap in BC’s housing reforms, it’s that the large-scale density is limited to transit stations. Places like Vancouver’s West Side are left out because they don’t have a SkyTrain, but they’re still an easy 30 minute bike or bus ride to downtown. Should those areas get less density than a SkyTrain station in Surrey that’s 45 minutes from downtown? Same thing with other parts of the province where the transit-oriented upzoning applies to bus exchanges, many of which are out by highways, closer to institutional areas like hospitals and universities. Upzoning here is still good but it misses a whole lot of potential closer to downtown.

“Well, we need housing in both those areas. If you look at the island, you’re right. Some of those bus depots are near hospitals and universities, but that’s exactly where you want the housing. You know, we have a challenge of health care workers who can’t afford to live in our communities. And so if you have housing close to their places of work, that’s a positive thing, but I get your point. And I do agree with you. That there are some communities that should be going beyond that and looking at more housing to be allowed, in the West End is a good example. What we were trying to do was bring legislation that would have a provincial reach. It’s very challenging to get into each community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood. But by doing what we’ve done now, we’ve raised the bar, raised  the floor across the province.” – Ravi Kahlon

These reforms are meant to be the first steps, not the whole picture.

“This is not a one and done conversation. We’re starting the conversation in a big way , and we have a lot more work to do.” – Ravi Kahlon

Just on transit-oriented upzoning though, does tying density to transit potentially cause neighbourhood groups to fight against transit for fear of having more housing too?

“This is not a new concept. This is the concept that we’ve been battling with for a long time in many communities. But now those very same communities are like, wouldn’t it be great if we had that conversation about transit again, because people can’t get around and more and more people can’t afford to have a car or multiple cars in their homes. I think now the time is right to think about what sustainable development looks like. If we get to that stage where communities are saying, ‘Hey, we don’t want transit because it means housing.’ Hey, there’s enough communities that want transit for our investments to go to, and we’ll focus there.” – Ravi Kahlon

One of the most interesting reforms BC is looking into is allowing point access blocks: apartment buildings with one central staircase instead of a long corridor, which allow for more flexible and livable layouts, including family-sized apartments. This is something that housing wonks find really exciting — watch Uytae’s video on it if you haven’t. But what’s the timeline on the reform?

“Yeah, we went through an RFP process. We’ve hired a consultant, an engineering firm, that is working right now with our fire officials. I’m hoping within a few months that we’ll have some recommendations that we’ll be able to make public. And by the end of the year, I’m hoping that this will be done, so that people can start building up to possibly eight stories. That’s what we’ve put in within our contract, for the consultants to engage on up to eight stories.” – Ravi Kahlon

So we’re potentially seeing reforms on point access blocks up to 8 storeys by the end of the year, 2024, and they’re hoping that other jurisdictions will learn from BC here.

“I think this is going to be game changing particularly around transit-oriented development areas. Less property assembly, more three-bedroom units. And what we have committed to doing is that when we’re ready to move forward, we’ll make it public and we’ll share any knowledge and research we have so that other provinces can benefit from it as well.” – Ravi Kahlon

Something we wondered though: these designs are common in Europe and Asia but if architects and developers here don’t have experience with them, is there a worry that uptake might be low?

“We’ll get there. I’m not worried about it. I think we just need to unlock the potential first.” – Ravi Kahlon

They’re also hoping to create standardized designs that developers can follow.

“My goal is that if we get to a place where we can have these types of buildings be built, that there is also be set designs for this in the future so that yes, you can have architects innovate and create beautiful designs, which I know they will, or they’ll be able to take things off the shelf.” – Ravi Kahlon

If we’re talking housing and transit, one thing that successful transit cities like Hong Kong do is integrate transit and property development. Is that something BC would consider for TransLink, metro Vancouver’s transit authority?

“It’s happening. I’ve got a law in place in British Columbia for as long as I can remember that said the province cannot buy more land than is necessary for the transit itself. Now, I don’t know who decided that was a good idea, but it, but it’s awful. We changed that law last year. We have half a billion dollar fund right now that’s actively buying parcels of land near transit oriented development areas so we can build housing. So we could build healthcare, schools, childcare facilities. I mean, if we want vibrant, healthy communities, why wouldn’t government be investing in those types of things near the transit itself?” – Ravi Kahlon

To go back to our question at the start: how do housing activists in other jurisdictions encourage their governments to be more bold on housing?

“And so my only advice (and I can’t speak for every jurisdiction) is to know why you’re doing it. What we’re doing in British Columbia is because we’re afraid that there’s going to be way too many young people looking to leave this province. There’ll be a brain drain. We’ll lose that talent. We’ll lose the vibrancy of our communities. And you know, people sometimes in my community, I’ll give you an example. When we launched our housing plan, I was knocking on doors in my community. And I had a gentleman say to me, ‘Hey, I understand why you’re doing it. I’ve lived here for 40 years. I love my community and I don’t want it to change, but I get why you’re doing it. What I said to him at the time was, whether you want your community to change or not, it’s been changing for 40 years. The building structure might not be changing, but who’s been able to live in our communities has been changing that entire time. And so we need to adapt. We need to ensure that when there’s young people in your community, that that is the sign of a vibrant and healthy community. When there’s kids in your elementary school, that is a sign of success. And so my only advice to anyone that’s considering this is don’t make it about left or right. You know, bring everybody to the table. We brought not for profits, housing activists, we brought homelessness activists. We brought folks who are like, you know, free market thinkers, all of them together and said, what are the challenges? How can we move forward? I think our plan reflects the values that different groups bring to the conversation and we have a lot more work to do and we have a lot of learning to do as well from other jurisdictions.” – Ravi Kahlon

Thanks a lot to the Housing Minister for chatting with us. We’re not going to sugarcoat it: BC’s housing problems are really bad, especially in Metro Vancouver, and bringing it all back down to sanity is honestly a gargantuan task that will take many more years. But these reforms are an actual, serious attempt at tackling the housing crisis, and that’s more than you can for what we’ve seen from most states and provinces.

We’ve had a complicated relationship with biking in the winter. Unlike some of our favourite channels on the topic, we’re not long-time winter cyclists ourselves. We only started getting into year-round cycling a few years ago. At first it was exciting, we were breaking a mental block that we didn’t realize we had. So you don’t need to stop biking when the weather gets cold and snow starts to fall? Why didn’t anyone tell us this before? Why is our culture so weird about this?

But biking in the winter never really became something we did that often. We did it here and there, it was a fun novelty, but it never felt that natural and we still shifted to walking and transit for most of our winter transportation needs. Part of this was spending a winter in Ottawa, which doesn’t entirely embrace being a winter city. Some bike routes get plowed pretty well, but a lot of the ones near us didn’t and that made a modest bike network get even smaller.

But even when we had clear routes we still had a big problem: bike cleaning, maintenance, and storage was a pain. A blanket of snow that’s nice and pristine at the beginning of winter gradually turns into a mess of salt, slush, dirt, gravel, and grime. This will get all over your bike. It can rust, degrade, and interfere with the components like the chain and brakes, and if you store your bike inside an apartment it’s a big mess to deal with the gunk that melts or falls off your bike. None of these problems were insurmountable, but they added effort and made us question each trip whether it was worth taking out the bike. Much of the time, it wasn’t. The standard solution to all of this is to get a dedicated winter bike, especially an old beater bike that’s easier to maintain or leave outside and not worry about it getting corroded or stolen. We should have done that: trying to ride our summer bikes through winter has probably been our biggest winter cycling mistake that basically guaranteed it wouldn’t be the most natural transportation option in the winter.

But since moving back to Montreal a third option has appeared: BIXI. Until this year, Montreal’s bike share program has only been available from mid-April to mid-November. The city gets a lot of snow and those are the seven months of the year that are mostly guaranteed to be snow free. The big concern is that the stations — most of which are on the street — would interfere with the city’s pretty intense snow plowing and removal process. This was the first year BIXI has been available through winter as a limited pilot project, mostly based around off-street stations in parks and plazas to stay out of the snow plows’ way, although there were a few stations left on the street to test how they would hold up or interfere. We were pretty excited for this pilot, especially since we’d started relying on BIXI for most of our short-to-medium distance cycling in the summer too. So how did it go? It was a little rough at first, with someone on Reddit declaring it a write-off, saying “I don’t think this winter BIXI experiment is working”, pointing to broken docks and bikes covered in snow. Let’s cover the good and the bad of BIXI’s first winter season.

As November 15 came and went and we entered into the first winter BIXI season ever, we noticed something interesting: it didn’t immediately start snowing. Obviously, the five month winter window is the time when it can plausibly snow, but it doesn’t mean there’s snow on the ground for the whole five months. Even if you have zero tolerance for cycling when any snow is in sight, extending the season through winter gives you an extra month or maybe two of cycling. This winter it took a few weeks for the first snowfall to actually happen, and even though it was a pretty big one, it melted after a week or two and left a few more weeks without any snow. This stuff is unpredictable, and operationally you just can’t turn a whole BIXI system on and off around it, but if bikes are available the whole time you can make your own decisions based on the actual conditions and your comfort level instead of just turning off all winter.

We didn’t feel the need to avoid biking just because there’s snow on the ground though, and that’s because Montreal does a pretty good job of bike lane clearing, although it depends on the route and borough. Even when there’s residue or active snowfall, we felt more confident on BIXIs than our regular bikes because they’re winterized — apparently the only bike share service in North America to do so — with studded tires and grippy pedals. Step-through bikes are also really nice in the winter because it’s so easy to hop off if you encounter any dangerous surfaces or obstacles. Falling off your bike isn’t nearly as big of a problem as people often assume, but like with walking or driving in the winter we did have one or two close calls. And finally the BIXIs are equipped with lights, which is extra important with the shorter days in the winter. The basic value proposition of winter bike share isn’t that it does anything you can’t do on your own, but that it makes everything much more accessible and convenient. You can buy and install studded tires or grippy pedals for your own bike but that’s another step that a lot of people won’t take, especially if they’re new to winter cycling and haven’t gotten hooked yet. As we mentioned, the biggest barrier for us was general cleaning, maintenance, and storage of our bikes, which was always possible to handle but inconvenient enough that we’d always think twice about taking out the bike. “Do we really want to deal with bringing all that mess back into our apartment? Let’s just walk, or take transit.” Having bike share available in the winter basically fixed that for us.

But there were a few problems and inconveniences with the winter BIXI pilot, most of which were related to stations. Many stations just had technical malfunctions where they wouldn’t accept a bike or wouldn’t give you a bike for no obvious reason. Most of the time you could just take a different bike or use a different dock at the same station and it was fine, but a handful of times a station was mostly or fully not working and it was pretty inconvenient. Sometimes it was also hard to dock a bike due to snow build-up around stations, especially when snow or ice changed the height of the bike going into the dock so that it wouldn’t catch the locking mechanism. And the last problem with stations was the lack of them. The density of stations was actually enough that we didn’t have much trouble finding one near most of our destinations, at least within the service zone. The problem was that if a station wasn’t usable (because of a malfunction, ice and snow, or just being full or empty) the trek to the next closest station could be long. In the summer if a station is full or empty it’s no big deal, there’s another one around the block. In the winter it’s a much bigger worry and something we had to be more careful to plan around. Obviously, problems like this are understandable in a pilot project and BIXI is working on them for next year.

We do have one bigger complaint or suggestion though that might be less obvious. Right now the normal way to unlock a bike is to scan a QR code with an app on your phone. This just isn’t a great method for winter. Nobody wants to fiddle with their phone and maybe take their gloves off to work an app when it’s 10 or 20 degrees below freezing. You might also have to deal with snow or ice covering the QR code. BIXI also has keys that you can stick directly into a dock to unlock a bike, but they stopped sending these out by default to members a few years ago. You can still get one but you have to specifically know about it and request an “exceptional shipment”. We did this last year and we’re really happy we did — it’s better in the summer and much better in the winter. We probably would have used winter BIXI less if we had to rely on our phones. We think it would help other people use the system through the winter too if BIXI brought back the keys as the default way to unlock a bike, or at least publicized them more, because they really are better.

Now that we have most bike-related winter problems sorted out and we live in a place with pretty good bike lane clearing, we’ve been able to get a much better sense of how many days are actually impossible to bike because of the weather. It’s hard to say that any day is actually impossible, but we encountered four or maybe five days this winter where there was enough snowfall that the plows couldn’t keep up and biking was actually a bad idea. It wasn’t even dangerous necessarily, just difficult to bike through and not worth the effort. There was also an ice storm in late January that left the roads pretty slippery that might have felt dangerous to bike on but we were away in Miami so we didn’t actually experience it. Overall, despite a few hiccups, winter BIXI was a game changer for our winter mobility. This is the first year that biking in the winter really clicked for us and felt natural — not exactly like in the summer, but reasonably close.

If you’re considering getting into winter cycling, we’d recommend using a different bike. If you have bike share in your city and it’s available year round, try it out. If not, consider getting a secondary bike for winter riding that you can permanently winterize, ideally an older one with simpler components that requires less maintenance and that you can comfortably leave outside. Of course, if you have something like a garage then some of these storage problems go away.