A man was shot in a penthouse apartment on Côte-des-Neiges Saturday.
I think the shooting at Galeries d’Anjou Friday evening was homicide #17, making this #18, but I may have missed one. The last one I saw numbered was this shooting in Lasalle three weeks ago.
Yes! Global says today’s was #18; on the other hand, the shooting in Laval in the early hours of Saturday was the first on Laval Island this year.
Cycling is getting steadily more popular here, with bike path usage alone growing 20% between 2010 and 2011.
Also a related piece on the bad feelings between motorists and cyclists and an anecdote from a cyclist who was knocked down by a motorist.
Tangentially, the Gazette today has a book excerpt from a work about 21st-century urban layouts (it’s interesting, but the book paragraph length is way too long for the web).
Bikes and bike paths are becoming so popular there are traffic jams at intersections. I often take the bike path through Laurier park to go from Rosemont to the Plateau. Bikes pile up at the corner of Christophe-Colomb and St-Grégoire as well as Brébeuf and Laurier (opposite ends of the path that crosses the park). When the light turns green for cyclists, everyone sort of merges into a big blob in the middle of the intersection that oncoming bike traffic swerves around chaotically.
It would be hard to convince people to calmly move across the intersection in single file, as the green light doesn’t last too long. Lane-wide bike boxes in both directions and on both sides of these kind of intersections would be perfect, as people would naturally move across the intersection in groups of 3-4 and have space to merge back into single file once on the other side. Turning bikes could stick to the sides of the box and not obstruct bikes going straight through.
This would also bother cars a lot less. As it stands, drivers don’t know what to expect and end up just sitting in the intersection. If it were visually clear that bikes get an advance green to clear the intersection first (in the form of a bike box), then the drivers would be able to predict bike movements more easily and move through the intersection faster.
I know they’re experimenting with bike boxes here (“sas velo”) in a few places, but not sure whether their use will be extended.
It’s true that cyclists ought to go single file, but I know well the corner of Laurier you mention.
I bike a lot on Montreal roads and paths and the things that I see frequently that are dangerous always have to do with turning.
On Maisonneuve the problem is cars turn on the same solid green as bikes. What city hall needs to understand is drivers have very limited visibility and most turn left blindly, even the most courteous ones. You need to look at 5 things to make a turn there safely. Peds from the east & west, bikes E &W and people infront of them. This aggravates drivers very much so eventually I hope they separate the lights for one party.
Off bicycle paths the most frequent thing I notice is drivers don’t signal turns any more.
@SN86 I called the city about this very problem and the guy in charge of the cycling department (or whatever) actually called me back to hear what I had to say. He mentioned that reassessing the light cycles along de Maisonneuve was part of an ongoing program meant to improve cycling in the city. Call the city.
William’s waved a majestic hand at this spread from Weekend magazine, November 1961: Montreal Women Are Wonderful.
Thanks for the shout-out! I’ll be publishing an updated version for 2012 on FuckYeahQuebec.com :)
Fagstein has done a number on the local broadcasting scene this weekend in the Gazette, tracking the stations, the changes and the personalities. There are also lists of AM stations and FM stations – including U.S. stations that can be heard here – and what’s up with them. In another list he surveys mostly English-language TV (and in an earlier blog entry, he laid out the situation with the proposed sale of Astral to Bell).
In an attempt to boost participation in municipal elections, the city tried offering voting by mail, but it was a lot of work for very little result and has been given up.
Could online voting work?
It should be feasible, but is it being done anywhere?
I’m pretty sure more people would vote if they could just enter a PIN number in a browser and click off a few check boxes. Or maybe a voting app?
Voting app won’t do. We have the lowest penetration of mobile phones in the Western World… heck, the Chinese have higher mobile phone penetration than we do. Telephone voting might work, but you would need to ensure who the voter is… so likely a letter containing your vote number, your PIN and the requirement that the call originate from the telephone number registered, so that someone couldn’t massively vote from one location.
We already have a problem with telephones in regards to political parties. They don’t need to identify their telephones, so you have no way of knowing who is REALLY calling you, other than to trust what they say, which is what lead to the Canadian voting scandal. It’s an insecure means of communication.
Well we do our banking online…
Following Friday evening’s fatal shooting at Galeries d’Anjou, a man was shot and killed in Laval outside his apartment building in the wee hours. No implication has yet been made that the two incidents are related.
A woman who apparently needs to use a powered scooter has filed a complaint against Couche-Tard because they wouldn’t let her bring it inside. The Couche-Tard spokesperson says they even offered to have someone bring things out to her and help her pay, but no.
The thing that gets me here is that the woman says she “wants to see electric doors and wide [a]isles implemented in every corner store.” That’s silly. Most deps are simply not large enough. Not one of the independent deps in my neighbourhood could do it. Rules like this can sound so beneficial till you think about the implications: this would be a sadder town if the only deps were the chains.
Apparently this Couche-Tard is accessible, they’re just upset about her scooter. What’s unclear is whether her disability means she has trouble controlling her scooter and is constantly crashing into everything. Do they let all other scooter-users in, just not her? Or are all people with mobility aids refused access by clerks, even though the store is physically accessible?
Perhaps they’ve put displays in the store that block the aisles so that people using mobility aids can’t get around?
Accessibility is an issue. And as we get older, it eventually becomes an issue for all of us. Inaccessibility is not a problem caused by disabled citizens bringing attention to exclusion.
Useful background: http://davehingsburger.blogspot.com/search?q=Grocery
If you read all the posts down to the one in September 2010 that’s enough to make the point. But there are more.
It would be more of a shame if people who needed accessible stores (most of us, at some point in our lives) were shut out of shopping anywhere because we like the image of crowded little independent stores.
Is that really what you two think? That all the little deps (and other shops) in this town should shut down if they’re not big enough to admit a wheelchair into their aisles, or located in such a way that they can be rebuilt to have automated doors exactly at street level?
I can see making a rule that new buildings have to include such amenities, but I cannot follow you there.
No, actually, I don’t think that old buildings all need to be retrofitted. It’s not feasible. (I wish they could be — I’d support government spending for that — but I don’t think it’s going to happen.) But I do think that if you do renovations, you should be required to make your changes accessible — even if the entire thing isn’t yet, new changes should need to be, so over time renovations add up to accessibility.
I don’t think that if our city were fully accessible, even if it meant fewer independent depanneurs, it would be sadder: I think it would be much, much better. (I also think it’s a false choice: we can have accessible buildings that are not owned/rented by chains.)
No, but often it’s only the chains with the deep enough pockets to come up with the money to make this kind of alteration and to sacrifice display space to making wider aisles, too. Dépanneurs and small businesses function on too narrow a margin, and are more likely to be tenants in buildings where they don’t have the freedom to make changes in the structure anyway.
But I think there’s got to be a limit. The entire city can’t reasonably be seen in terms of “can a wheelchair get in here? If not, nobody can.” Doing that is asking a giant guilty sacrifice to a small minority who have troubles with mobility.
We don’t give small businesses a pass on paying minimum wage, or paying taxes, or any other requirement just because they have a small margin. I’m not sure why accessibility is considered different.
I know it’s complicated. We can have more stringent rules for new buildings (and some other ones: hospitals, schools, government buildings) and allow older buildings to be grandfathered in. We can require renovations of a certain type or amount to include bringing things up to accessible levels (for the landlord or the tenant, whoever is the appropriate choice) while not saying that repainting or putting in new windows means you need to put in extra-wide doors and ramps.
Again, though: a small minority of people right now need a wheelchair. A not small minority of people will, during the course of their lives, require that the places they go be accessible.
We give a pass to small businesses on language laws.
@steph
Because our economy would be even more in the toilet if you eliminated all the small anglo businesses and independent contractors.
denpanosekai 21:49 on 2012/08/11 Permalink
I live by this building, our doorman was asked if he heard shots around 8PM Friday.
To think I was considering an apartment on the tenth floor back in June!