The Bastarache commission has adjourned till next week, no doubt to give everyone time to assimilate the bombshells dropped by Marc Bellemare in his two days of testimony. Martin Patriquin had some interesting commentary after yesterday’s session.
Updates from August, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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The STM is making a new promise that we won’t have to wait more than ten minutes for a bus on a number of key routes between 6 a.m and 9 p.m. Other busy routes with a more directional bias will have a similar schedule between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. in one direction, 2 and 9 p.m. in the other. This is unreservedly a good thing.
But this morning’s announcement was disrupted by the president of the drivers’ union, who wanted to talk about how to cope with riders taking out their frustrations on bus drivers, giving as an example someone who got bent out of shape because of a 54 bus being late. Unfortunately for them, the 54 isn’t exactly one of your express routes.
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Marc
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zach
On the busy routes like the 24 and 80 the drivers have their smoke breaks and leave together so you have no buses for forty mins then four buses one behind the other.
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Tux
The STM should leverage the internet to deliver up-to-the-minute information to us. GPS tracking of buses. Delay updates. etc… at the VERY least an employee should come out to explain buses that don’t show when there’s a double-size line waiting at a terminus. I commute to work from Cote-Vertu in the mornings, and sometimes my bus just decides not to show up, making me 30 minutes late for work. I never get an explanation when this happens and, in my tired uncoffee-d state, it does sometimes make me murderously angry. It’s kind of pointless to abuse a bus driver, but I understand the impulse to do so, at those moments they represent a large, faceless, uncaring bureaucracy that has screwed you yet again… and they’ll get away with it too.
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qatzelok
This is a great thing. Ensuring punctuality is essential if we want to replace cars with buses and tramways. The other key thing to improve is accessibility for disabled and elderly people.
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A meeting last night of neighbours of the old Redpath mansion showed that many of them are against a proposed condo development, as is Heritage Montreal.
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I’m not focusing on the Bastarache commission because this blog tries not to drift too far from city matters. However, there’s no escaping the importance of Marc Bellemare’s testimony about the appointment of provincial judges, which continues today.
Here’s a long PDF document of his complete testimony yesterday (via Antoine Robitaille on Twitter). In fact if you want to follow live, #bastarache on Twitter is not a bad way to keep up.
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The reliably laughable Montreal Economic Institute, recycling ideals about deregulation that went out with the end of the last century, proposes getting rid of all forms of taxi permits to bring prices down. I’m not saying the current system is perfect, but swamping the city with a lot more desperate, underpaid cabbies is a wacky solution.
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Tux
Here’s a crazy idea, ask the taxi drivers what kind of changes to the rules would make things better. Study the results and compile an action plan. Too many decisions are made in a vacuum in this town. Our politicians have no real connections to the community, so they serve us poorly.
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qatzelok
Why only ask the cab drivers themselves? The hordes of desperate cabbies flying around the city center affects everyone who lives, works, or shops there.
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Kate
I think one problem is that cabbies have different interests from owners of taxi companies. But I don’t see how anyone would benefit from deregulating the whole thing as proposed. At least, as it stands, visitors to town know they’re not going to be robbed by a cabbie, either directly or via the cabbie taking you from the airport to downtown via Ville d’Anjou.
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Marc
If you listen to many cabbies, what’s bothering them most these days are the Bixis and the 747 bus.
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qatzelok
If their biggest “pet peeves” are the more ecological and low-cost alternatives to cabs, perhaps the city should look at how to retrain cab drivers to do other more useful things than fly around in cars all day looking for easy money.
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Projet Montréal is carrying out its own analysis of the city’s contracts and says they’ve been 30% higher than they ought to be. They’re pleased about the federal audit.
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A suspect has been arrested in a cold case, the murder in 1999 of a woman from Laval whose body was found stuffed into a suitcase at Heathrow. Lurid.
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Vision Montreal roundly criticized the Cité Nature development out by the Olympic park, but that hasn’t stopped Louise Harel from buying one of the apartments herself. NB the promotional video plays corny music.
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J
Just checked out their website. Thought i’d mention one of their environmental merits includes an ‘ultra fast garage door opener’…. oh god.
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Kate
Brilliant!
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Preview from the Miami Herald of this weekend’s NASCAR race. Rue Frontenac is happy that three Quebec drivers will be competing.
Every 10 minutes? I’ll believe it when I see it.