 Highway 17 at the 91 connector eastbound traffic is backing up almost 80th Street, so quite busy through that region, and over to the Queensborough Bridge in the 91-8. You don't realize what most North American cities are like until you step out of your car. Parking lots. Strip malls. Roads so wide they're impossible to cross. Without a car, you're stranded. Lost in a sea of asphalt. However, there's a city right here in North America that shows us things don't have to be this way. It is Montreal, Canada, and it is a Canadian city with very European roots. It is located in Quebec, Canada, the only French-speaking place in all of North America. Old Montreal has a lot of suburban sprawl and wide roads like the rest of the North American cities. The historic city center has largely remained intact with its cobblestone roads and its very European architecture, giving it some very walkable and human-scaled streets. Today, I'm going to take you around by metro, by bike, and by walking, and then we will give the city a human mobility score. Old Montreal is home to some of the most European-feeling streets in all of North America. And here you have the cobblestone and brick paving together with the mid-rise architecture and many storefronts that line these buildings. This street is something straight out of Europe. They just don't build streets like this in North America, especially where the facades of the building and the doors and everything spill right into the street. There's a conversation that happens between the people in the building and the people walking outside. There's very little distance between outdoor space and indoor space. As we walk down this street, we can really feel that we are enclosed by these buildings beside us. We feel like we are outside, but also at the same time inside a room, which is how urban designers define a space like this. And there is a serious lack of outdoor rooms in the North American urban design lexicon. Instead, we have parking lots everywhere. Some traffic engineers and planners in North America are reluctant to put these narrow streets in their cities, arguing that these big trucks, such as garbage trucks, deliveries, and even fire trucks won't fit through. But as you can see, because there's such a lack of traffic here, it's very easy to accommodate. You can see cars and trucks loading and unloading occasionally on the street, but because there's no parking spaces, not that many people hunt around for parking, giving most of the street width to pedestrians. And it's a very nice avenue to walk down. This is Place Jacques Cartier, and this street is not closed off to cars at all. In fact, it has very aggressive traffic calming measures and paving that merely suggests that cars should not be here. I'll show you all the treatments that makes this pedestrian priority street so great. Let's start with this giant bullard by the intersection. This big bullard forces all the turning cars to be very careful that they don't enroach into the pedestrian space. The sidewalk treatment and the paving bricks continue all the way through the intersection, discouraging turning cars from coming through. There's also no curbs in front of the shopfront, which encourages pedestrians to take the full width of the street. These different pavers provide tactile feedback to drivers driving through. It's noisy and it provides a bit of vibration to make sure people slow down as they're driving. And to make sure you don't pick up too much speed, there's a big sturdy stop sign saying, let's at the bottom of the hill on a concrete block. Traffic calming often fails because we only perform one or two out of the combination of different factors that come into psychologically slowing cars down. This can be done through physical barriers or it can be done through more soft measures such as having a large amount of pedestrians on the street, having a narrow street or having the visual perception that you're moving through buildings really quickly. If you have space between two buildings, you don't have to make into a street. You can turn it into a linear park instead, some benches, some planters, some trees, some lamp poles and you have yourself a very nice public space. This is a decently wide corridor, probably about 12 meters across but because of the planters on either side, it divides us up like a boulevard, a mini boulevard for pedestrians. It looks visually much narrower and provides a much nicer place to sit on the sides. Staying warm during the cold winters is one of the challenges of building a city like Montreal. They've created this very neat indoor space by enclosing off what was formerly an outdoor space. Whether indoors or outdoors, the principles of human-scale design remains the same and this street was just as wide before it was enclosed in a glass roof. This is essentially what we want when we talk about a human-scale street, a street that's not too wide and a street that's very comfortable for a person to walk in. This video is brought to you by the EIT Urban Mobility Academy and if you love learning about Urban Mobility, check out their new courses completely free at urbanmobilitycourses.eu, link in the description below. The Montreal Metro has 68 stations in its system and they are all fully enclosed and underground, making it possible for this whole system to be heated. Another interesting fact is that it's full of rubber-tired trains, much like the Paris system that is modeled after. Even though we're in an underground metro station right now, these lights and the atmosphere created by these walls make it feel like we're outdoors in a plaza or street-like setting. I think it's brilliant. The Montreal Metro is not just a place of movement. In fact, it's so expansive that you can even get a coffee at this coffee shop behind me. Need to transfer to another line? Cross-platform transfers make it very easy, just walk from one train to the other, no stairs involved. In a transit network, at least one transfer is almost inevitable. Making these transfers as easy as possible is key to making the system very accessible and easy to use for the people involved. If you want to learn more, the YouTube channel RM Transit has a great video going into detail about cross-platform transfers. This is one of more than 600 Bixie bike stations dotted around Montreal, containing more than 7,000 bicycles in total. Bixie is a combination of the words bicycle and taxi and as of 2018 it had more than 5 million rides per year. Montreal is a city with many hills and the name is actually Mount Royale, which has a huge mountain in the middle. To address that fact, Bixie has introduced these new e-bikes, which makes it much easier to get up those big hills. Remember the good old days when you didn't need a cell phone to run a bike? Well, even the stand here now tells you to download the app. A traffic com street like this one, which is only 30 kilometers an hour, gives a great opportunity to accommodate cyclists of all ages. It feels safe, you're enclosed and car traffic is very slow. One-way streets like this one invite very fast moving traffic. They're hard to cross for pedestrians and biking down these are not a good experience, plus they're very loud. But that's where the two-way bike lanes come in. A two-way bike lane allows cyclists to go against the flow of traffic to get to their destination. Although these two-way bike lanes provide a lot of protection in the road segment, they do kind of fall apart where the intersections are involved. As a driver you have to look both ways for cyclists coming through the intersection and as a cyclist you have to watch both ways for cars coming through. So both parties get out of stress from trying to navigate this intersection. Around Montreal you'll also see many of the one-way blue bike lanes that are much safer in design and I personally prefer them because it avoids the conflicts that these two-way bike lanes provides. This parklet here is a great example of filtered permeability. It separates the commercial street from more residential zone back there. And by diverting the traffic and only allowing cyclists and pedestrians, you also have an opportunity to create a parklet, which is a great public space that can be recovered from what used to be traffic space. An interrupted facade of mid-rise buildings such as this one behind me is key to Montreal's walkability and a sense of enclosure meant for pedestrians. The YouTube channel Ode the Urbanity made a great video about Montreal's unique mid-rise neighborhoods. Montreal is doing a lot to make its neighborhoods more livable and part of this effort is to pedestrianize quite a few of its streets. Here's a quick and easy way to give half the street back to pedestrians. It involves an arch, a sign, and some quick chain-link fences. In this pedestrian zone you have some nice paintwork being applied to the asphalt here as well as a planter that doubles as a little table where you can put your coffee. This pedestrianized space also opens up room for a street market, which you see behind me. Even though it's really cold outside, there's still people selling fruits and vegetables under a gazebo tent. Montreal is not a utopian city. However, it's living, breathing proof that human-scaled cities in North America can thrive as long as we have the political will to make them in the first place. I hope you enjoyed this tour of Montreal, Canada and now it is time to give the city a human mobility score. For transit, I'm going to give Montreal a 4 out of 5 for its very warm and extensive metro system. Even though it has excellent bus coverage, some frequencies are lacking. Although there is a bright light in the future as this city is going through a big transit expansion in its regional rail network. For cycling, I'm going to give the city a 2 out of 5. Even though it was one of the best cities in North America for cycling like 10 years ago, the other cities in North America has really done a lot to catch up. We are comparing this city with other European cities as well, so it doesn't really stack up that well. The two-way bike lanes on many of the one-way streets here are a great idea, but because the signal timing is a bit lacking and it's not clear who has priority, it sometimes creates some pretty dangerous situations for cyclists. For walking, I'm going to give the city a 5 out of 5. It has some very historic buildings and really beautiful streets and is especially stellar for a city in North America. As I mentioned, the winters are very cold here, but the underground city and the metro network give you a nice place to duck away when you just can't take the cold anymore. For bike share, I'm going to give Montreal a 3 out of 5. Even though the Bixie system has excellent coverage and the docks in the bike share system keep the sidewalks neat and tidy, they are a bit of a hassle to get to if you don't know where your next dock is. The other bike share systems that I've experienced in Europe has a much better app experience. I'm not saying that the Bixie system is bad. I'm just saying that there is a bit of a lack of options in the city, so it would be good to see the city experiment with other bike share or scooter options. And that gives Montreal a human mobility score of 14 out of 20. I hope you enjoyed this city and this tour with me, and I hope to see you in the next city.