Children and older adults are consistently less likely to live near bike lanes, finds a new study that mapped cycling infrastructure in three Canadian cities over a decade.

The McGill-led research analyzed census data for Montreal, Vancouver and Victoria. Across all three cities, neighbourhoods with a higher proportion of children (under 15) and older adults (65+) were located farther from cycling infrastructure.

“Safety is one of the biggest barriers to cycling for children and older adults. Improving access to dedicated cycling infrastructure can help people feel safe enough to choose biking, supporting active mobility and healthy aging,” said lead author Hiroshi Mamiya, Assistant Professor in McGill’s Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health.

Montreal made consistent progress in closing equity gaps related to age between 2011 and 2021, results published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health show.

The city expanded its bike network across a wider range of neighbourhoods, growing from about 891 kilometres in 2011 to nearly 1,450 kilometres in 2021. In contrast, expansion in Vancouver and Victoria was more concentrated in downtown areas, where fewer children tend to live.

In Montreal and Vancouver, neighbourhoods with higher proportions of racialized people also had poorer access to bike infrastructure, a pattern not seen in Victoria.

“Future investments should prioritize equity-deserving communities and monitor how people move toward or away from newly implemented infrastructure over time, as changing demographics can shape access,” said Mamiya.

This is the first Canadian study to compare how access to bike infrastructure has evolved over time across multiple cities, he added. The three cities studied were selected because each has invested heavily in cycling infrastructure but taken different approaches to how those networks were built.

Mamiya’s students and colleagues have also created an interactive map to make the findings more accessible to the public.

“Temporal shifts in area‑level access to cycling infrastructure for equity‑deserving groups in three Canadian cities: A descriptive epidemiologic study,” by Hiroshi Mamiya and Daniel Fuller was published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health. This research was supported by the INTErventions, Equity, Research, and Action in Cities Team and the Artificial Intelligence for Public Health (AI4PH) Training Platform, with funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.