There isn’t much fresh news about Luka Magnotta, because he’s saying nothing. An AFP writer ponders the difficulties to be faced by the defence in a case where the suspect has posted video of the incident in question, and the Journal falls back on looking over some of his blog entries.
Updates from June, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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There’s to be a demo Tuesday afternoon at Quebecor HQ to try to save the Mirror. That’s a Facebook link but should be visible without logging in.
Drawn & Quarterly looks back affectionately at the Mirror’s coverage of their world; folks are also linking back to Justin Giovannetti’s piece from September about the plight of alt-weeklies.
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Bill Binns
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david m
who would show up for that other than a few angryphone cranks?
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Kate
I don’t know, but the closure of the Mirror has definitely created a disturbance in the Force that’s not limited to angryphones.
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Tux
My wife and I were saying that a lot of our real sex education as teens (about GLBT issues, sex workers’ issues, kink, the importance of sexual compatibility in relationships etc.) came from Sasha. Not to mention, the BOM, the rant line… all the great stuff they did that kept us entertained and informed, and there’s nothing being published right now that fills that gap. Surely a free weekly doesn’t take megabucks to publish, could make a modest profit or break even on advertising and classifieds… it just feels unjust to summarily shut it down, without even putting any effort into revitalizing it. Get those annoying vest-wearing mofos to hand it out aggressively like they do Metro…
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Josh
In some smaller centres, campus papers also act as quasi-alt weeklies. Maybe this creates a niche for The Link or the McGill Daily to go a little bit bigger.
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walkerp
angeli.ca has a great essay on her blog about her relationship with the Mirror.
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The Gazette has an urban design piece today that misses the point entirely. The writer’s not too interested in urban design, properly speaking – neighbourhoods or quality of life – but mostly in architectural spectacle. “Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Westmount Square, I.M. Pei’s Place Ville Marie, Pier Luigi Nervi’s Tour de la Bourse – these are all buildings from the past that garnered the city positive attention and allowed Montreal to participate in a broader international cultural life.” Well, they may have made the architectural magazines, and PVM’s form is iconic, but his conclusion that we therefore need to turn the new bridge into an architectural tour de force is a dubious one.
Quel Avenir invited Taras Grescoe, most recently author of Straphanger, a book about public transit, to talk about improving Montreal’s transit situation: basically, Grescoe would really, really like to see more metro stations built here.
Both these writers invoke projects that would cost a lot of public money. In Montreal, inevitably, both ideas also hark back to the halcyon days of the mid-1960s when anything seemed possible here. Since then, horizons have been steadily narrowing and possibilities belt-tightened out of existence. I wonder if this trend will change in our lifetimes.
On a related theme, Fagstein summarizes a question-and-answer session done by the STM’s Michel Labrecque, about near-future developments at the transit commission.
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ant6n
On a vaguely related note, the transportpolitic has an article covering the recent tram-building boom in France. They are built relatively cheaply and effectively (separated but not grade separated), so that even relatively small places can afford them. The point is that North American cities should take notice.
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Ian
Given that even Toronto’s streetcars get lifted off the tracks by snow & ice accumulation in winter, the visual pollution of streetcar lines (and our local experience with downed lines in ice storms) and that we can’t even do road repairs without consistently running far past schedule and well over budget, I suspect that building a tram line in Montreal when we already have a perfectly serviceable bus & metro service would be a mistake of the highest calibre.
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ant6n
@Ian
Part of the point of the article is that streetcars in America are broken, and are not the same as trams in France. -
Robert J
We should look into building el trains on major arteries like pie ix or gouin rather than the high speed bus lines their currently planning. Elevated metros cost less and can easily be adapted to the climate for better comfort. Platforms and stairwells could be indoor elevated structures with AC and heating for the winter. Although it would change the visual landscape of some neighborhoods, I would argue that it’s better than more street-level bus transit, which is depressing .
As for tramways, most of the European cities that use them in central areas are much smaller than Montreal (Nice, Grenoble). Other larger cities use them as suburban extensions of the metro (Paris, Rome). I think metro is the right solution for a street like Park ave. Building a tramway in central Montreal is just putting off the eventual need to double up metro lines, as suburbanites increasingly commute with transit to the island and require a high capacity central network.
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ant6n
Pie-ix is an interesting example. People travelling along the corridor basically all want to go West. So the best way to deal with capacity and speed issues may not necessarily be to provide a trunk line that dumps all passengers into the green line at Pie-ix station, but rather to provide capacity going west. If you do that, then the average distance passengers travel along the corridor goes down, and thus also the requirement for capacity and average speed.
Pie-ix could connect with an electrified train de l’est in the north, with an extended blue line around Jean-Talon, and the green line in the south. The distance between any of these rapid transit option would be about 3.5km, so less than 2km are required to get to the nearest rapid transit station. A 40M$/KM tram (or bus rapid transit) would be a more appropriate solution than a 100M$/KM elevated rail on concrete stilts. -
Stefan
the problem is that typical north-american cities outside downtown lack the necessary density (and also tax load) to support tramways. even the plateau may not be dense enough for it. rapid buses (with their own lanes), or trolleybuses, are the cheaper and realistic option there.
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ant6n
@Stefan
That may be true for North American cities in general, but not for Montreal. Montreal has many bus corridors with 20K-40K passengers per day. This is way above the streetcar threshold, squarely in the tram area, and getting close to rapid transit territory from a ridership perspective. -
MB
@Ian: I wonder how we dealt with the snow and ice back when we had extensive tramways throughout the city…
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Kate
@MB: Andy Riga talked about this on his Gazette transit blog. Short version: we had the technology.
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Stefan
@anton: you are right there about density. in vienna the 28 tramway lines average 18k pax/day.
pax/weekday for the top montreal bus lines (these weekday pax rates are slightly higher) from the STM:
139 – Pie-IX 36 999
121 – Sauvé/Côte-Vertu 36 764
535 – Voies réservées du Parc/Côte-des-Neiges 33 425
141 – Jean-Talon Est 28 078
69 – Gouin 27 095however there is less tax money available, for both creating and running the lines, compared to european cities, because of much lower tax rates. then the province prioritizes investing for individual motor vehicles, and for political reasons, outside montreal. i won’t get started on corruption adding overhead costs.
that’s why i’d still argue for trolleybus (as a long-time proven and relatively cheap alternative to use electricity) and buses with proper lanes (i see the nr. 1 problem that buses are stuck in traffic, especially passing through downtown/plateau, making a poor alternative to cars).
in short, for the money of creating a tramway line, 3 rapid bus lines with right-of-way or 10 trolleybus lines could be installed. it’ll also be finished ahead of time.
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ant6n
Well, choices between different transit modes should be based on economics and technology and only on ideology to the extend that the development could be achieved politically. (apparently in Germany, they use a threshold of 4K ppl/day for streetcars, and a threshold of 30-40K for rapid transit)
The thing about light rail and some streetcars in North America is that they are really expensive. And in France, they somehow manage to get really good value for the money – for example there’s an article on how the the Besancon tram is cheaper than Montreals Pie-IX busway.
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Kate
It feels almost like a cliché now to mention that we’re paying heavy overheads here to the mob and to the big construction cartels, but it appears to be a simple fact of life in Quebec. Consider the new metro cars: other, lower bids were made, but as you noted here in your own blog, @anton, Bombardier was going to get the contract no matter what.
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ant6n
Yeah, it’s unfortunate. The two major ways in which French trams are relatively cheap is
a) not reconfiguring the whole street to built the tram, but just taking away existing car lanes. This means less construction, and thus less cost.
b) using standardized rolling stock, allowing more competition for rolling stock contracts, but also better economies of scale to produce cheaper rolling stock. (I don’t want know how much those trolleys are going to cost…)Seems Montreal doesn’t do all that well in those departments.
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They may as well go protest in front of Rogers, Fido or the Apple store. A a paper like the Mirror is meant to be read on the bus or metro or maybe while having lunch alone. People use their smartphones for that now. I do wonder if the paper was losing money or just not making enough for it to be a worth while endeavor for a giant like Quebecor.