A nice Sarah Gilbert piece on a Mile End photographer looks back on a neighbourhood character.
Updates from March, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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A look at the city’s plans for the west end of Ste-Catherine by Spacing’s Devin Alfaro is a good read, especially his critique of the Tremblay administration’s talk about inclusiveness but walk about upscale development: “building a dynamic, vibrant neighbourhood requires low-income and middle-class residents, not just expensive condos that serve as pieds-à-terre for the wealthy.”
A similar move by the Tremblay admin is their decision to let the Centre 7400 be turned into condos, which will deprive dozens of community groups of their office and meeting space. Also, the developer has given the city a lousy $400,000 to buy them off the requirement of including “affordable” living spaces in the project. (They must’ve had a good laugh about that.) Some previous discussion about this project here and here.
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Seen this tweeted a few places today: the Mayor of London and Arnold Schwarzenegger on a couple of the London-branded Bixis.
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Montreal is closing its books for 2010 with a surplus of $192 million.
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Singlestar
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Finding the mayor strangely silent in the scramble for federal campaign promises, Richard Bergeron spoke up and asked for a fast train on the Windsor-Quebec corridor and a tram to the south shore.
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Because of a Pinboard posting, I’ve just become aware of ant6n’s frequent service transit map, a very handy item that prints to 8.5×11 and can easily be folded and carried around. Now if only the key bus lines really did come reliably every 10 minutes…
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The Seaway is open again after a maritime mishap in which a big cargo ship got stuck at an angle just off Île Notre-Dame. Good photo in La Presse.
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There were 37 deaths on roads on the Island of Montreal in 2010, plus 18 pedestrians, many of them elderly, and four cyclists. The numbers of injured have notably increased.
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Jack
The number of injured will continue to rise as working class neighborhoods like Villeray, St.Michel, Rosemont etc. are used as landing strips by our suburban brothers and sisters. Take a look at Christophe-Colomb, Papineau, Delorimier, St Denis all urban highways that cut across my neighborhood. The speed limits are rarely enforced, people burn yellows and reds at high speeds. I saw one of the cyclists right after she was killed at the corner of St Denis and Jean Talon, heartbreaking. These people are never killed in TMR or Hampstead and I know why.
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craig
Even though the number of cyclists has grown rapidly in Montreal (a 40% increase since 2008), serious accidents involving bikes have decreased (from 40 in 2009 to 26 last year).
The number of fatal accidents has remained stable since 2005 (an average of four 4 a year).
So the introduction of bixis in 2009 didn’t result in more serious accidents and deaths, as some had predicted.
Here in Ottawa we’re only getting 100 bixis this year. We were supposed to get 500 but the City of Ottawa decided not to spend the $500,000 it had allocated in last year’s budget for bike-shares. One excuse was that bixis might not be safe.
I wish some of our car-loving politicians would head down the highway to Montreal, rent a bixi and try out Montreal’s network of bike paths. They’d see how far behind Ottawa is.
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Stefan
if the politicians tried to cycle then something like that might happen:
http://www.grist.org/biking/2011-03-03-traffic-snarled-la-goes-bike-wild-with-1600-miles-of-lanesthe mayor of los angeles got cut off by a car while cycling in the bike path, broke his arm and just signed off on ~2000km of new bike lanes … coincidence? :-)
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Stefan
In the second article the blame is again given foremost on the weakest traffic participant, the pedestrians. this is exactly the mentality ‘free road for free drivers’ which is transported also in the ads and responsible for all these deaths. drivers should have to take their responsability! it’s such a contradiction in our society that we’re so afraid of little bacteria but give almost no thought to the instant death probability in traffic.
personally i think speed should be limited to 30km/h in the city, UNLESS a road is enclosed by walls making it impossible for a vehicle to endanger pedestrians or cyclists on bike lanes, i.e. a highway. to seriously enforce that anyone caught trespassing the speed limit should result in seizure of vehicle + license for a significant period, e.g. a month, in which the person should have to undergo training in alternative transport modes and deliver proof of that.
result: overall time to drive will not increase anything but marginally, but top speed will be in line with cyclists which makes the whole environment much more safe. could that be worth 59 lives PER YEAR?
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Stefan
to put the number of people killed on montreal’s streets in perspective:
it is about 10 times as high as in comparable european cities.
it is also as high as the number of murders in montreal – but how does the amount of police ressources in prevention compare? not to mention that traffic deaths are easily preventable if one wants to make it a priority: causes are well researched and solutions well analyzed …
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CBC has a teasingly short report on mixed responses to the lavish expense of the Quartier des Spectacles and the future of actual creative culture in the city.
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Police ended up using tear gas today to disperse a student demo against tuition increases that was taking place around the Loto-Quebec building on Sherbrooke Street, and there were three arrests; the Gazette reports it briefly in terms of an obstacle to traffic.
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One of those interminable listings of city livability has pushed Montreal down to 123rd place of 180 while Quebec City is 25th. Maybe Montreal just isn’t spoiled enough.
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mdblog
I’m not surprised. No one in Quebec City gives a damn about Montreal. As far as they’re concerned Montreal is where “les immigrants” who spoil sovereignty referendums come from. Montreal would be much better off if it could form it’s own province within Canada and I’m sure a CLEAR majority of my fellow citizens would agree.
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Kate
I think these comparison lists are pernicious because many cities are not comparable and because the view is taken from some imaginary white middle class angle. Quebec City’s still overwhelmingly white francophone and if someone of a visible minority whose French wasn’t perfect went to live there, I’m sure their experience would not be superior to living in Montreal.
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Stefan
it it always useful to look critically at which criteria have been used/weighted. in that particular case, the article mentioned that is limited to objectively measurable ones – so for example a certain not-very-well-qualifiable ‘experience’ of living in montreal is not considered, which is nevertheless a reason for many people to come here -> big contradiction.
i think these comparisons could greatly benefit from personalization: answer a few questions to position your priorities and get a more appropriate ranking by applying some basic statistical math. but then that’s not news in the sense of ‘mass media’ …
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William
The vast majority of these rankings are actually compiled for the benefit of multinational corporations so they can index “hardship” payments to their expat executives. Needless to say, the relevance of these rankings is fairly trivial for anyone who doesn’t fit this category.
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qatzelok
Also, because of different cultural values, international city comparisons (Quebec/English Canada, for example) are meaningless. English Canadians value different things in their communities, which ought to be obvious to anyone who’s visited them.
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Kate
qatzelok, can you expand on this theory? I’m curious.
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192 000 000 sounds like a lot but the City spends about 22 million a day on all its services. This means that they finish the year about 8 days cash out of 365, or about 2%…