The Median Strip Idea: What St-Laurent Can Learn from a 130-Year-Old Bike Lane
On September 19 at 10 am< , I'm leading a Critical Mass ride down St-Laurent Boulevard. We start at the controlled intersection at 815 St-Laurent, pass through McArthur, Donald, and Ogilvie/Coventry, and finish at the St-Laurent LRT station. The point isn't just to ride — it's to put a specific idea in front of residents, city staff, and whoever else is paying attention: a protected bicycle lane built into the median strip of the boulevard.
I want to lay out the case for that here, including the parts that push back on it, because that's the standard I try to hold every proposal on this blog to.
The precedent is older than you'd think
The instinct might be to treat a median-running bike lane as some untested, imported idea. It isn't. Brooklyn's Ocean Parkway got a bike path built into its landscaped median in 1894 — the first bike path in the United States. It's still there. Eastern Parkway, designed by the same team (Olmsted and Vaux, the Central Park architects), uses the same layout: a main roadway flanked by wide, landscaped medians carrying dedicated paths, separated from car traffic entirely.
The honest counterpoint
I'm not going to pretend every "median bike lane" in North America looks like Ocean Parkway, because it doesn't. More recent designs — narrow center-running lanes squeezed into tight medians between travel lanes — have drawn real, documented criticism.
| Ocean Parkway model | Narrow center-running model | |
|---|---|---|
| Median width | Wide (20+ ft), landscaped | Narrow, squeezed between travel lanes |
| Function | Effectively an off-street path | An on-street lane relocated to the center |
| Main risk | Requires available right-of-way width | Turn conflicts at every intersection |
| NYC example | Ocean Parkway, Eastern Parkway (Brooklyn) | Allen St / Delancey St (Manhattan) |
Treating these as interchangeable is exactly the kind of outputs-vs-outcomes conflation I've criticized in other city files. If we're going to build this, it needs to be the first model — and that starts with an honest measurement of what St-Laurent's median actually offers.
The timing isn't an accident
The City is already running an Environmental Assessment for the St-Laurent Boulevard Transit Priority Corridor, covering Hemlock Road to Innes Road/Industrial Avenue, explicitly looking at multi-modal design — walking, cycling, transit, and Complete Streets principles. That process is underway right now, which means the design of this corridor is not a hypothetical future decision. It's being made.
That's the opportunity and the risk in one. The opportunity: there's a live process to plug a specific, evidence-backed design idea into, instead of shouting at a wall. The risk: "it's already being studied" can become an excuse to avoid saying anything concrete about what that study should conclude. I'd rather be specific now and be wrong in public than stay quiet and be irrelevant.
Why I'm doing this as a ride, not just a post
Ward 13 residents can't be expected to track an Environmental Assessment study through every stage of city process — nobody has time for that, and I've said before that people need simplicity and clarity, not a homework assignment, to engage with civic issues. A ride down the actual boulevard, on the actual date, is a way to make an abstract design question physical and visible. You don't need to have read the EA scope document to understand what a protected lane down that median would feel like — you just need to ride it with us.
Join the ride — September 19
Critical Mass, St-Laurent Boulevard
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