Montreal has a choice to make: design itself to be a car-friendly American city, or a pedestrian, bike and bus friendly European city.

In the Plateau, where the debate over parking has been raging for several years between the Green party and store owners, both sides could learn from Europe.

The city of Zurich found that when cars were banned and the street was turned into a pedestrian zone with trams, foot traffic increased 30-40 percent, actually helping local business.

Source: New York Times

While American cities are synchronizing green lights to improve traffic flow and offering apps to help drivers find parking, many European cities are doing the opposite: creating environments openly hostile to cars. The methods vary, but the mission is clear — to make car use expensive and just plain miserable enough to tilt drivers toward more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

Cities including Vienna to Munich and Copenhagen have closed vast swaths of streets to car traffic. Barcelona and Paris have had car lanes eroded by popular bike-sharing programs. Drivers in London and Stockholm pay hefty congestion charges just for entering the heart of the city. And over the past two years, dozens of German cities have joined a national network of “environmental zones” where only cars with low carbon dioxide emissions may enter.

“In the United States, there has been much more of a tendency to adapt cities to accommodate driving,” said Peder Jensen, head of the Energy and Transport Group at the European Environment Agency. “Here there has been more movement to make cities more livable for people, to get cities relatively free of cars.”

Bixi, the bike sharing/rental service has finally arrived in Montreal. You can rent bikes by the hour at over 300 self-service stations in Ville-Marie, Plateau-Mont-Royal and Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie. Other stations will be available in Outremont, Sud-Ouest and Villeray–Saint-Michel if the first phase of the roll-out goes well this summer. Find a Bixi station near you.

To try the service at first, you can go to any station and insert a credit card/debt card to rent a bicycle for the hour or the day – just $5 for 24 hour access. Once you’re hooked, you should subscribe to the bike sharing service at the Bixi website. One year subscriptions are just $78; or you can opt to try it for 30 days, at $28.

The BIXI system has been honoured in TIME magazine’s list of the best inventions of 2008 and received the GOLD award for best product of 2009 in the Energy & Sustainability category of the Edison Best New Products Awards.

Where there is a problem, there is an opportunity…Montreal finished at the bottom of the list behind Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Quebec City, Ottawa and Halifax.

Via: Huff Strategy

Corporate Knights Magazine unveiled the third-annual Corporate Knights Most Sustainable Cities in Canada

The top cities in the 2009 list. The comprehensive ranking identifies Canadian cities whose practices leave the smallest environmental footprint possible and create a healthy, thriving population. Corporate Knights Sustainable Cities Ranking are as follows:

Large city category: Edmonton, AB
Medium city category: Halifax, NS
Small city category: Yellowknife, NT

…Montreal’s (5.96) ambitious GHG reduction target is complemented by the city’s innovative “Bixi” bike share program and a plan to double its network of bike paths by 2014. Montreal’s 2009 budget allocated a record $322 million to accessible, energy-efficient public transit. Host to over 32 public arts events last year, the largest community garden network in the country, and the fewest fast food stores per capita of all cities, Montreal’s top score was in the Social Well-being category.

Opportunity to improve: Montreal struggled in the Ecological Integrity category with high rates of water use and poor air quality. High unemployment rates aided to a poor showing in Economic Security.