Montreal bike-traffic data will not be available over the coming months after the city stopped paying the company tasked with collecting and sharing the data.
Eco-Counter, which installed dozens of bicycle counters across the city and hosts the data-sharing platform, stopped updating the site March 18 as a result of the cut funding.
The city says it now plans to install its own bike-counting technology and publish figures on its open data website, but a spokesperson said data isn’t expected to be available until this summer.
“It’s not really a logical decision,” said Vélo Québec CEO Jean-François Rheault. “Changing the technology isn’t a problem,” he said, but “it’s a bit weird not to have continuity” from one technology to the next.
“We’re going to have a hole” in the data, he suggested, which he said will make it difficult for his group and others to monitor bike traffic in Montreal.
Civil servants under the previous administration made the decision to suspend payments to Eco-Counter, city spokesperson Hugo Bourgoin said in an email.
The civil servants recommended the city avoid paying for the platform, he said, and to remove the 59 “instrusive” counters installed directly on city roads. The city plans to install the new bike counters higher up, Bourgoin said, including on existing structures.
“From now until the new detectors are functional, we will continue to collect and analyze data from the current detectors,” he said, adding that the city plans to publish the data this summer.
Even once the city publishes the data, Rheault said using the open data site will be a downgrade from the current Eco-Counter platform. The open data site “isn’t updated regularly,” he said, and presents data in a less readable format than the Eco-Counter site did.
Elected officials should “accept leadership” on the issue, Rheault said, calling on city councillors to intervene.
Contacted for comment, a spokesperson for Ensemble Montréal reiterated the information provided by Bourgoin.
Eco-Counter and Projet Montréal did not respond to The Gazette’s requests for comment.
I’ve reported for The Gazette since 2024. I love covering a good politics story, but any day I tell Montrealers something new about the world around them feels like a good one. Got a tip for me? Email me at jawilson@postmedia.com