Some people from a defunct municipal party called Parti Ville LaSalle have joined up with Projet Montréal. They didn’t succeed in getting anyone elected in 2009 though, so Projet gets no additional councillors from this move.
Updates from November, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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February’s Lumière fest is to spotlight plucky little Belgium and various local stars will also contribute concerts culminating with a closing ensemble concert that’s a hommage to Jacques Brel. Also the fries with mayo, no doubt.
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Mayor Tremblay says the average 3% property tax hike for 2012 is reasonable, allowing the city to keep up its services while respecting taxpayers’ ability to pay. A homeowner with a building evaluated at $348,000 will have to pay $95 more next year. The press release goes into detail about how the budget manages to cover the city’s needs while not ballooning out of sight. Quotes from various media on OpenFile, dissection by Quel Avenir.
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William
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Chris
William, what is in fact unreasonable is how little private citizens are charged to store their private property (car) on public land (parking space).
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William
Chris – I totally agree! And for that matter, I actually think that private parking is also too cheap, especially when the land is wasted for surface lots when it could be used for housing, offices, studios or manufacturing.
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There was some upset with how police “branded” some indignés with UV ink while clearing them from Victoria Square last week. Police justify this as marking certain individuals who were told to leave the area, so they would be identifiable if they returned.
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Michel
And Godwin shows up in Montreal.
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An entrepreneur has come up with the idea of a tunnel from Saint-Lambert to Île Notre-Dame which would create a new link to the city via the Concorde bridge. It’s a thought, but was that bridge designed to take the pounding of a regular rush hour? And what happens to the island if it’s part of this proposed commuter link?
Here’s the idea on the developer’s own site.
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Bert
This might be as bad an idea as I originally thought. In the morning the extra bandwidth should move some of the traffic from the south-shore side of the Victoria bridge entrance in to Montreal, though it still dumps it in to the Bridge-Wellington west-old-montreal area. In the evening it should move some of the traffic from the Montreal side through the wider pipeline available. For all intents, this is adding a lane or two to the Vic.
The extra wear-and-tear to the Concorde must be evaluated, however, perhaps the extra visitors to the Casino might help pay for the maintenance.
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qatzelok
While we’re contaminating green spaces with suburban car commuters….maybe our boomer elite could build a highway over the mountain to relieve congestion on Park avenue as well?
Why not a parking lot in Parc Maisonneuve to encourage suburbanites to drive there and enjoy the peace and clean air?
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Faiz Imam
This fever dream proposes that 25,000 cars a day will use the tunnel.
Such a volume cannot cross ile Notre-Dame without constructing a bona fide 4-6 lane limited access road. Also a new interchange would have to be build around existing parks along the St-Lambert side. So “contaminating green spaces” is right on.
This ironically comes on the same day as Quebec and Ottawa announce $70 million over the next 15 years to protect the St. Lawrence River.
“The St. Lawrence Action Plan will focus on protecting biodiversity, promoting sustainable use of the river and improving water quality.”
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/million+river+protection/5786906/story.html#ixzz1fGBWtbdB
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Fascinating bit of Montreal’s history here: the Jewish anarchists and the Yom Kippur Ball.
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Public transit in the Montreal area has never been so popular – and never been so broke. OpenFile asks why the STM doesn’t sell any swag.
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Bert
Maybe when they decommission the MR-63s and MR-73s they could sell the seats, like they did at the Forum. Otherwise, the stainless steel poles would make for good railing.
I wonder if the swag would cost more for those buying in Laval and Longueuil?
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Kate
Heh. Good point.
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Chris
And yet we have $3 billion for Turcot!
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It’s not difficult to sit down with a city map and suggest new metro stations and lines, but making the best sense of them is another matter.
Marc Dufour has a page about the city’s prediction in 1967 of the grandiose metro system foreseen for 1982 (massive PDF file) and Matt McLauchlin of the Montreal by Metro site has a page showing the evolution of ideas for the metro from 1944 onward.
This Canoe blogger has come up with an ambitious one (although it ignores the option of stretching further into Laval or Longueuil) and McLauchlin proposes this complicated layout. Both these maps include a second north-south line that would visit Mile End, and both also provide better service to the northern edge of the island than we have now.
McLauchlin also has a simpler map showing extensions proposed by various transit entities. (We were told by the STM guide during the Un métro la nuit event that the only extension being taken seriously right now is the blue line to Anjou.)
About a year ago, Taylor Noakes posted three other extension maps (it’s not clear where he found them) with his commentary.
Almost all these fantasy maps show too many lines, as if someone had overdosed on New York, London, Paris or Tokyo subway maps and tried to reproduce their density here. But we only have a population of 3 million and some of the areas served by the maps are far too thinly populated to make sense of digging tunnels at great expense to reach them.
Dufour comments on Noakes’ page that maybe the metro should never have been built at all: this city had a vital tram network till the 1950s and if we’d updated that and kept it running, it would be the envy of other cities by now.
This is always going to be the problem: political and economic pressures distort the more common-sense solutions staring us in the face. Metro lines will go where voters are, not where simple need dictates. Suburban mayors will agitate for metro stations because it’s “their turn.” Fashions and trends will come into play and industries will pressure cities to make changes that will be profitable for them – after all, someone convinced the 1950s administration that trams were passé and all the cool cities were switching over to buses.
And I ask again: what are we doing now that people will look back on from 2060 and shake their heads and say “How could they have been such idiots?”
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ant6n
Barcelona – 3~4 Million in metro area – 124km subway, >200km? of electrified surface rail
Berlin – 3.5~4 Million in metro area – 150km subway, 330km of electrified surface rail (with 20min service or better)
Munich – 2.5 Million in metro area – 100km subway, 400km of electrified surface rail
Montreal — 3~3.5 Million in metro area – 70km subway, 31km of electrified surface rail
Montreal is doing well compared to many other cities of its size; but it’s still far behind the better transit cities in its size category. Even doubling the Metro network might not be completely crazy, if it could be paid for. Although electrifying/separating surface rail is much more cost-effective.
Also, those European transit cities tend to build lines much more focussed on cost-benefits and ridership projections – so it is possible to do that.
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David Tighe
Not completely electrifying the suburban train system while having a surplus of cheap electricity
At the same time using the labour that could have done this to build an already obsolete highway interchange in an urban area
Extending a metro system underground through low-density suburbs when alternatives maybe ten times cheaper exist
Planning a major urban hospital without taking account of public transport and pedestrian access
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James
You said it David!
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Michael
I love looking at fantasy metro maps, and although I’m not a huge metro user myself, I feel strongly that although there are other, less expensive solutions, the only long-term solution that makes real sense is digging metro lines, not tramways on Park Ave or whatever.
That said one common thing I notice is a lack of consideration for the places where people want to go in these new maps. For instance, a solution that doesn’t include a station inside the Casino doesn’t make much sense – it probably gets more day-visitors than anywhere else in Montreal. Likewise for PET/Dorval – any new metro (including surface metro) plans that don’t connect to the airport just doesn’t make much sense to me.
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Ghastly incident Tuesday afternoon downtown when a man was flattened by a big truck on Ste-Catherine. When a journalist says it was a “spectacle horrible” you’ve got to believe it.
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Everyone seems to be getting into the mode of proposing new ideas for the city, even as Mayor Tremblay prepares for a sober budget to be released tomorrow. Taylor Noakes has been listing features and services we don’t have and now Quel Avenir looks at three New York ideas he thinks we could borrow; in the Gazette the CEO of Cirque du Soleil had a boosterish thing about turning this town into a capital of creativity – not the first time we’ve heard about that notion.
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The renowned skateboarding spot in the Olympic park is being moved as part of the work of enlarging the Impact stadium. Also, a video of the Big O in use.
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Kevin
Brian Wilde got video of this last week http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111125/mtl_skateboarding_111125/20111125/?hub=MontrealHome
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The Museum of Fine Arts is promising some fancy stuff for 2012, notably an exhibition of major Impressionist works in the fall. There will also be a Robert Lepage imstallation that’s never been seen in Canada.
Yeah, well next year my car is going to have to pay an extra $75 in Plateau property tax for the 9 square metres it occupies, so in comparison, that does sound reasonable.