by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Montreal’s great for biking, right? Lots of bike paths, the lovely Lachine Canal to ride along, easy shortcuts for the street-savvy, and, because it’s less of a car-oriented city than others, traffic can be manageable. Sounds great.

Peter Krantz, however, would like you—and the city, and the province—to think again. The 40-year-old ex-courier, inventor and cyclist activist can easily point out any number of failings our biking infrastructure suffers from: poorly laid-out paths, dangerous metal barriers to keep cars and cyclists from colliding, and of course our famously reckless drivers.
“Look at this here,” Krantz says over one of the dozens of photos he took of bike path hazards. This one in particular is of the bike path near the St-Patrick bridge over the Lachine Canal in St-Henri, where the path swerves sharply before merging with the bridge. “These metal poles. They’re supposed to protect bikers from cars, right? What happens if a biker hits them? He’ll be going to the hospital, won’t he?”

Pointing to a photo of the Rachel path where Clark intersects it, he says, “This is insane. How many problems can you see in this picture? I see at least 12.” These include potholes, the two-way direction, the parked cars and street signs lurching over the path at head level. Krantz’s opinion on the state of Montreal bike paths is distinctly at odds with our much-trumpeted status as one of the most bike-friendly cities in North America.

He has several ideas on making the city more amenable for pedal pushers. One is to institute speed bumps, as the city of Westmount did, at intersections where bike paths cross streets. Another is to create a shelter for his former comrades-on-wheels at Place Ville-Marie, where scruffy, smelly couriers linger between calls for smoke breaks (tobacco and otherwise) and lunch, causing offence to some of the more delicate office set.
Krantz also wants to create downtown bike paths along Ste-Catherine and/or de Maisonneuve. “There are no bike paths in the downtown core. Where’s the logic? A city’s bike paths have to extend outwards. Now, it’s just like, ‘We’ll put one here, another over here, and maybe another over here,’” he says over a map of the city, pointing to the Plateau, Westmount and the Lachine Canal.

Others ideas include bike bridges over dangerous intersections, such as the one by the Norman Bethune statue islet at Guy and de Maisonneuve. “The city told me it would cost too much,” he says. “But then I read in the papers that everybody’s freaking out because our children are obese. How much will obesity cost us in the future? The city doesn’t want people to exercise?” Krantz is passionate about bikes, far more so than the average Sunday biker, an attribute he acquired over his many years of couriering and dealing with idiots both on foot and behind wheels. But he has a place reserved in his private hell for bureaucrats.

Pedals and politicos don’t mix

The city’s poor state of biking, he believes, is caused by the perspective of those who are in charge of laying out the city. Bureaucrats, he feels, know nothing about biking. “If you ride every day downtown, then you have experience,” he says. “Until you do, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”

Krantz’s dealings with the political class have not been happy ones. In last year’s mayoral elections, he was a strong Tremblay partisan because of promises the now-mayor made on the campaign trail about bike paths and bike safety. Krantz says he met with Tremblay last June—whom he knew from inventors’ contests in the mid-’90s, when the mayor was the provincial Minister of Industry and Technology— and was told he would get work from the city to develop the city’s biking infrastructure. That fell through, however, after Krantz had spent much of his own money developing plans and presentations in January. Frustrated and broke, he showed up at city hall in late January to speak to the city employee with whom he was to meet, but was kicked out. He says city bureaucrats won’t return his calls, and, apart from a call from the mayor three weeks ago, hasn’t heard from Tremblay. He is left broke and bitter.

He hasn’t severed all his ties with the city, but the snail’s pace at which government moves is grating. “It’s always a waiting game,” he says. “This leaving me in limbo is what pisses me off the most.” Krantz is now working on a new, anti-theft bike rack. •