Petition for a slimming cure for the Turcot
Mobilisation Turcot has a petition up for our new transport minister to seriously consider alternatives to the official scenario for redoing the Turcot. Details are laid out in thie PDF file.
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Ephraim 20:25 on 2012/10/30 Permalink
Silly question, how much extra time will it take to get an ambulance to the hospital with this plan? We are talking about people’s lives. The slimmer version seems to have two roundabouts instead of direct access to the hospital.
Kate 20:38 on 2012/10/30 Permalink
That seems a reasonable question to ask those planners.
Chris 21:01 on 2012/10/30 Permalink
Ephraim, and the follow-up question would be: given that air pollution kills approximately 2,500 people a year in Quebec, how many lives will be saved by having a slimmer Turcot? My guess is it’s a good tradeoff.
Philip 00:54 on 2012/10/31 Permalink
If air pollution kills 2500 Quebecers every year, it’s long term damage that does people in. You can’t trade them off for some poor guy who gets stabbed/hit by a car/has an aneurysm, then proceeds to die in an ambulance waiting at a roundabout for rabid Montreal drivers to make room.
There’s increasing the well-being of the city by improving air quality, and then there’s making sure people don’t bleed to death a block away from the hospital due to traffic.
Stefan 05:36 on 2012/10/31 Permalink
if the question is how to get fast to people dying otherwise, in Austria a fleet of helicopters of is used. average response-time is 13 minutes from call to treatment, and hospitals have landing sites on their roofs. this works in remote mountain valleys as well as in extremely densely populated city cores. a slimmer turcot could pay a dozen of those helicopters at least, so that it is covered by the public health system.
there is another recently introduced strategy: in case of gridlock, cars on highways have to separate out left and right always, so that in the center a free lane is created so that urgency vehicles can pass. the Rettungsgasse (in german, with illustrating image) it works pretty well.
David Tighe 08:37 on 2012/10/31 Permalink
I am astonished how we are prepared to use helicopters ad nauseam to provide redundant traffic info. but do not seem to allocate any for transporting patients where every minute is crucial. In many European countries they are used routinely. With congestion growing in Montréal rapid access to hospitals will become more and more difficult. Furthermore, in France for example, ambulances are staffed and equipped to provide advanced medical help.Here I believe they are not. Drive carefully!
Chris 17:05 on 2012/10/31 Permalink
Philip, why is the life of someone stabbed more valuable than the life of someone slowly killed by automobile-generated air pollution? Hey I know, if we want ambulances to be really responsive, we should just ban private automobiles completely! That’ll free up road space for ambulances!