Quebec prepared to rethink Turcot
Good news for Montreal here: the new government is prepared to do some rethinking of the Turcot rebuild to bring it closer to what Montreal wants, and it’s definite enough that some scheduled demolition is being delayed until decisions are made about things like moving the railway or not.
Steph 22:05 on 2012/09/25 Permalink
Are they going to write a $7.8-million cheque to cancel this contract too?
david m 22:11 on 2012/09/25 Permalink
wow! excellent news!
Kevin 07:07 on 2012/09/26 Permalink
Oh great. The project’s going to be put on hold until the next election.
Taylor C. Noakes 08:03 on 2012/09/26 Permalink
They need to keep some of the superstructure, close it off to cars, and turn it into a local Highline-style park.
Matt 08:43 on 2012/09/26 Permalink
As much as I like the idea Taylor, I’m not sure they’d go for it.
Robert J 11:27 on 2012/09/26 Permalink
@Taylor yeah I don’t think Turcot’s built as well as the rail line they used to make Highline in New York. As much as I find it visually impressive, it should probably be straight up demolished.
Kate 12:25 on 2012/09/26 Permalink
I have hopes for this. The idea of moving the train tracks onto a more marshy surface, part of the project when the Liberals left off, was incredibly foolish – both expensive and dangerous. Various engineers and others have suggested saner solutions to replacing the Turcot and maybe now those ideas can be reviewed.
ant6n 14:06 on 2012/09/26 Permalink
I’m liking this government more than I thought.
Kevin 11:20 on 2012/09/27 Permalink
I know I’m in the minority on this blog saying this, but we need the Turcot. It needs to be much bigger and even at 330,000 vehicles is far under the needed capacity.
Until the Ring Road around the island is built (which will be never) and as long as we have a working Port there needs to be some way to get cargo around. And for better or for worse, that’s last-minute shipping via trucks.
(And don’t bother saying West Island commuters should find another way. If there was another way, they’d be doing it. But the AMT is pathetic.)
Jack 14:24 on 2012/09/27 Permalink
@Kevin, you sure are and I would argue you are even deeper in the minority of those who will be subjected to more car harrasement.
Kate 18:01 on 2012/09/27 Permalink
Kevin, I don’t think it’s realistic to talk about removing the Turcot, because a whole large piece of this city has grown up around the expectation they’ll live in the West Island and commute into town, or something like that. But I don’t want to see the bandwidth increased because the more cars that can use it, the more will use it.
The pattern of lives, work and commutes may be quite different 100 years from now – when, if we’re lucky, people will look back at our times and think we were completely nuts to sit in traffic for hours and hours every week – but right now a lot of people need to get to and fro along that axis.
If somehow the Turcot vanished tonight, all we would have tomorrow would be a nightmare commute on the Met for most people. And then another highway 20-Turcot-Decarie would be built.
Kevin 10:04 on 2012/09/28 Permalink
The problem is that nightmare commute already exists.
When cars are bumper-to-bumper for a full 8 hours a day in the Turcot — and even longer around Decarie Circle — it’s obvious that the existing infrastructure is inadequate.
Kate 10:33 on 2012/09/28 Permalink
Radically, I would submit that people have to learn either to live closer to where they work, or work has to be done more and more from home. I realize a lot of jobs have to be done on site, everything from cooking to nursing to construction work, but man oh man, there are so many make-worky white-collar jobs that could literally be phoned in if people weren’t such bloody pack animals, having to congregate somewhere every day and act out their little office dominance-submission games. We really have to get past that as a trend (most humans in history haven’t done that, it’s not a given of our existence and it’s a very unhealthy way to live, besides).