Winnipeg may not seem like one of Canada’s best cities for cycling, but a new ranking places the city ninth in Canada for bike infrastructure.
Tech-powered real estate brokerage Redfin released its inaugural ranking of bike-friendly cities, and awarded Winnipeg a “bike score” of 61 — on par with cities like Toronto and Richmond, B.C., but a far cry from list-topping Victoria and Vancouver, with scores of 80 and 79, respectively.
The rest of the top 10 was made up of Montreal, Longueil and Brossard, Que., as well as Ottawa and Waterloo in Ontario. Winnipeg was the only prairie city to make the grade.
According to a sustainable transportation planner, however, the ranking only takes into account the total amount of cycling infrastructure — not the type.
“They look at the kilometres of what the cities consider cycling infrastructure, Jamie Hilland of Urban Systems told 680 CJOB.
“If you look at the city of Winnipeg, on paper, we have a lot of cycling infrastructure, but a lot of it is not what we call triple-A, which is all ages and abilities infrastructure.”
Hilland said while the city isn’t known as being as bike-friendly as some of its counterparts in, say, B.C., it is improving — although Winnipeg could stand to focus more on protective cycling infrastructure, rather than just designating bike lanes by painting lines on the roads.
“For a mid-sized Canadian city, we do pretty well,” he said. “We have a good pedestrian cycling strategy that’s in place, and we’re slowly enacting it and moving on it… we’re not too bad.
“A lot of our infrastructure unfortunately still remains painted bike lanes… I think that’s gone into the calculation.”
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