It’s the sort of story journalists love because they can write it’s a case of life imitating art: an actor who portrayed a mobster was arrested in a sting in which police were pretending to be gangsters. Tony Conte played Vincenzo Spadolini in Omertà.
Updates from November, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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New bus lanes are being added along Notre-Dame and Saint-Patrick as alternatives to the Turcot, in advance of the start of construction there in 2013. The STM’s press release includes a PDF map; Andy Riga tweets that one of the routes involves the as-yet-unbuilt link from Cavendish up to the highway.
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Reasonably good CP piece on Place d’Armes as a visual crash course in Montreal’s history.
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The indignés were just promising some new actions when Mayor Tremblay asked them to leave Victoria Square with their heads held high. More stories may emerge, but a picture of the problems with homeless folks with whom the indignés had neither the resources nor the experience to cope is coming into focus.
I’m wondering: were the police told to back off and not intervene, and let the indignés try to handle troublesome itinerants on their own, as a sort of lesson?
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Mathias Marchal finds that the most popular suggestion submitted to Partage ton idée about the Quartier Latin is to make part of Saint-Denis pedestrians only – from Sherbrooke down to de Maisonneuve, as has been done during various festivals already.
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Liza Frulla says on Quel avenir that Montreal needs to turn from a lamb into a lion and basically stop letting Quebec push it around.
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I don’t want language issues to become a dominant theme on this blog (other things interest me more) but at the moment it’s kind of spiking.
The mayor of Quebec City is upset at the preponderance of English signage and posters – in Paris. (More Catholic than the Pope?)
Also, students from France are coming here to study English because an old deal made between Quebec and France means they get the courses much cheaper than at home, and they don’t let the irony stop them.
One of the Metro bloggers talks about learning English to come to Canada and to work here. A Le Devoir writer ponders the Charest government’s soft-pedaling of Bill 101.
On OpenFile on the weekend I summarized the scuffle at the Caisse de dépôt over the discovery of two guys in management who only speak English. Oopsy.
This will go on, and since the English issue in Quebec mostly focuses around Montreal, it will crop up on this blog from time to time. It will be interesting to see if laws are tightened up or existing laws are more stringently applied in response to current worries about language here.
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Kevin
Benoit Aubin writes about it Tuesday in the Journal de Montreal, with the surprising attitude that Francophones worried about English should grow up and realize they’re no longer underdogs.
http://lejournaldemontreal.canoe.ca/journaldemontreal/chroniques/benoitaubin/archives/2011/11/20111122-091800.html
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La Presse reports on various problems at Occupy Montreal: fights, shooting galleries, and a situation described in one quote as “we spend the day doing social work.” The indignés are getting a crash course in what the dreg work of public service is like, and what life is like for people forced to sleep rough rather than choosing to do so as a statement.
New Occupy Montreal posters are displayed on Facebook but should be visible to everybody.
ATSA is doing an installation again in Émilie-Gamelin Park (Berri square) – in a way, their park encampments there over the years have been a prelude to Occupy. This one is called Fin Novembre and they’re looking for donations and volunteers to help out with the free meals and clothing they provide onsite. (An Urbania writer says she’s seen an Occupy tent that has migrated there.)
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A survey has found that a majority of Montrealers would be OK with paying road tolls if it meant better roads, bridges and transit – basically, shorter commute times for everybody.
Turns out the government has pondered returning tolls to the Jacques-Cartier bridge, which is holding up over time but nonetheless needs expensive maintenance work.
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Bill Binns
“IF it meant better roads, bridges and transit”. That is a pretty big “if” considering that Montrealers are probably buying the most heavily taxed gas in North America for the privilege of driving on crumbling roads while dodging falling concrete and collapsing bridges and tunnels.
A likely outcome of adding tollbooths will be that the construction of the toll equipment itself will eat up the first five years of tolls.
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Kate
I hadn’t thought about that – the cost of modern tollbooths, designing them, installing them, hoo boy. You may be right.
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jeather
So all the toll money goes to cover maintenance — then road maintenance will just lose all other funding, and we’ll be no better off. If the tolls are added to current money, then fine — even if it takes 5 years to make back the costs of installing them — but they won’t be, and we’ll all be worse off.
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William
If installing tolls made no economic sense, then it wouldn’t be done. As long as a proven and off-the-shelf system like “EZ-Pass” was used, then the costs should not be outrageous (why the new toll bridge isn’t EZ-Pass is beyond me). Moreover, let’s not forget that in addititon to being a good way of raising money from service users, tolls are also useful for changing behaviour.
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Bert
William, the toll collection on the bridge on the A25 IS transponder based with a camera backup. EZ-Pass is a brand name. However, with the possible proliferation of disjointed toll roads, I wonder if anyone will see the vision to make them all compatible so that one transponder can be used. Otherwise this will be the result… http://cdn.ubergizmo.com/photos/2010/7/26-gps.jpg
That said, Mayor T. will probably just say that all roads should be tolled But to appease everyone there will be one transponder per arrondissement.
If my commute were better (faster, more fluid, better ride) I could be convinced of supporting tolls. But if the money is just goes in to general coffers, then forget it.
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ant6n
To implement a congestion charge in Stockholm, they simply have cameras recognizing license plates. These are stationed at all points where you can drive into the congestion area (downtown). At the end of the month, they count how often every license plate has crossed into the congestion area, sum up the cost, look up the address for the license plate, and send a bill to the car owner.
No transponder needed, no toll-booths, and the administrative overhead is not all that big. -
William
Bert, despite “correcting” it, you pretty much entirely missed the point of my comment, lol. A multiplication of systems/operators in Sydney meant that the whole system had to have an expensive do-over a few years after it was launched. We fortunately already have a standard in this corner of North America, and it’s called EZ-Pass.
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Bert
But William, we are a distinct society. We have our own blood collection agency, our ows harmonized sales tax, our own immigration system…. Why stop now?
The last thing we didn’t screw up was putting rubber wheels on the Metro.
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Chris
Which is why increasing the gas tax is a better idea than tolls. 1) no setup, just change a number in the computers 2) it’s more fair, being proportional to the distance you drive (& therefore pollution) instead of the route you take. Why should a short drive from the Shore over the bridge be tolled, when a long drive from the West Island not be?
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William
Chris, a tax on petrol is not fair at all. People who choose to use the roads at the most congested times of day – that is to say, the most valuable time of day – pay just as much as people who make sacrifices and travel off peak. I totally agree however that congestion tolling for all suburbs is a great idea.
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Slight feeling of déjà voodoo here with a story about farmland expropriations in Mirabel, but this time it’s for a train station, not an airport.
I’m usually all for trains, but I wonder if a station is needed in Mirabel now that the airport is dead and the CMM is on the brink of adopting guidelines against more sprawl into farmland.
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More then-and-nows from Guillaume Saint-Jean: Shaughnessy house, now part of the CCA; a building and view utterly erased by the Radio-Canada development in the 1960s; the Judah house, almost unchanged – too bad about losing those lacy railings, though –; the Drill Hall, nullified in the 1970s for the building of the Ville-Marie autoroute. More on Spacing if you click on Guillaume’s name as a link.
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How Quebec is developing the Turcot is set out here tersely but informatively. If engineering firms are making the real decisions without oversight from the transport ministry, how can we expect costs not to swell?
That’s not crazy speculation when you consider this as precedent.