Foreign students protested Monday after the abrupt closure of the Collège supérieur de Montréal during final exams. Quebec has refused to renew the college’s permit, leaving nearly 900 students in the lurch.
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Kate
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Kate
I don’t often link to Youtube videos but this interview of Sergio Da Silva by Christopher Curtis is a probing investigation of the political uses of police power in our society.
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Kate
TVA reports on a hearing about Arthur Galarneau, who killed his parents and his grandmother in Rosemont in March 2023. His remaining relatives don’t want him let out of Pinel – ever – and are critical of health services for not having done more to help the young man, or at least to have somehow deterred him from committing violence.
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Kate
Three levels of government are kicking in funds to support the Biosphere and its environmental museum.
I’ve been to the Biosphere and while I don’t retain much about the exhibits, I found it exhilarating to stand on the highest platform with the wind whipping through off the river.
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Kate
American firm INRIX investigated why Montreal has such interminable traffic jams, and there’s no single answer. We’re a shipping hub, so a lot of trucking goes through; the constant reconstruction of roads; the climate. This item gives our politicians a range of excuses.
Nobody mentions mandatory return-to-office policies, notice.
MarcG
Cuts to the STM budget seem oddly absent as well.
Ephraim
So, not about the fact that we have the oldest set of mechanical traffic lights that can only be set back to being on time by a giant black out?
Tim S.
All those reasons make sense to me, and my personal observation is a lot of traffic is in fact made up of trucks, which need more space to slow down and accelerate. As frustrating as it is, I guess being a transport node is why there’s a city here.
jeather
As cars get bigger, they also increase traffic.
Ian
Most of the highway chokepoints are because of truck traffic, for sure. I think a lot of the inner city problems could be solved by reducing the legal axle base so there are fewer big trucks actually in town. For example, beer companies use full 16 wheelers to do dep deliveries, that’s totally not necessary. Reducing axle base allowances would also reduce idling pollution, force companies to take on the effort of logistics so the city doesn’t have to deal with their bad choices, and would reduce a lot of wear and tear on the roads, and would make traffic safer for pedestrians and bcyclists, too.
Joey
@ian yeah this is an example where public policy could accelerate the inevitable adoption of the electric rectangle vans that Amazon delivery contractors use.
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Kate
Centraide made an AI digital duplicate of the city, and used it to create a forecast showing that a 6% hike in rent would force 16,000 Montrealers into a condition of economic precarity.
Ephraim
This, from a system that when asked what days of the week have the letter D in them, answered Wednesday and Friday. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7lRbNbwuczQ
Tim S.
AI in this case sounds more like ‘fancy Excel’ than the LLMs.
jeather
Both Wednesday AND Friday do have a D in them! Good job.
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Kate
Metro has a feature crunching real estate numbers, which may interest folks with a toe in that world.
impossibus
I thought it seemed oddly written and then, behold, at the bottom: “Cet article a été produit par l’intelligence artificielle et édité par un journaliste.” I wish they put that disclaimer at the top.
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Kate
The Coast Guard and the fire department were called out for a rescue operation for someone who fell into the river off the terrasse Bonsecours in the Old Port on Sunday evening.
Monday morning, they’re still looking.
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Kate
I had never heard of the Coupe du monde du canoë‑kayak, but we had one here on the weekend and it’s being called a big success.
CE
I met someone the other day whose daughter was competing. She told me she will likely be on the next US Olympic team. She made it sound like this event was a very big deal for people involved in rowing sports.
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Kate
The Gazette has a story of a $500 dine‑and‑dash that happened at a deli near the Orange Julep.
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Kate
Three hundred Lachine residents held a Grand Splash on Sunday to urge their borough to allow for better access to the water. They jumped into the canal, but the idea is to have open water swimming in the river. Note that they’re not asking for a beach.
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Kate
A report on a local study asking whether bike paths hurt local businesses sums up the results: no, they do not.
bob
That’s what someone says it says, but it is absolutely not what this study says.
What it said was that bike paths play no role in the increase of restaurants within 150m of bike paths in Montreal, except downtown*. That is, bike paths have no positive impact. They did not look at negative impact: “the analysis does not account for how bike lanes might influence the stability or survival of these establishments [restaurants] over time or their individual performance measured by revenues” it should be noted that in the center of Montreal you are always within 150m of a restaurant, unless you are up high in a tall building – and downtown there’s Les Enfants Terribles, Portus 360, some other rooftops (you have to leave your bike downstairs).
As to business other than restaurants, the study says nothing. it would have been interesting if they looked at something like, say, dry cleaners, or magazine stores. How many butcher shops have opened in the last ten, twenty years, or furniture stores, or pharmacies.
- Their reasoning about downtown is goofy. The increase in bike traffic is mainly due to the universities (as they say). Students do not bike to restaurants downtown, they bike to school. They are already downtown, however they got there (they didn’t bike there in February), and they graze the neighbourhood for pizza and shwarma. It has nothing to do with a bike path.
In any case if a car-related reason is killing local business it is parking lots – the ones outside Costco and Walmart where you can drive to buy everything available on any three block stretch of commercial artery (and some of those local merchants are selling you stuff they got at Costco and Walmart). The problem is not that people can’t park in front of your hardware store, it is that your hardware store is obsolete, and your heirs want nothing to do with selling hardware, and anyway your landlord is going to double or triple your rent in the hopes of winning the franchise location lottery.
As this study points out, bike paths do not cause revitalization, they are merely a part of a revitalization that follows gentrification. The people who are using the bike paths are mostly not using them for commercial purposes. And, yes, for every example one can give of a commercial thing you do not do on a bike, there’s some chimer-inner with an exception proving the rule – “Oh, I bike to the hardware store to buy paint all the time. All my DIY projects have been supplied by cycling to pick up two by fours, drywall, and pipes. I brought my kitchen cabinets home on a Bixi.” Fact is, bike paths are not for commerce, never were, never will be. And picking up a baguette on the way home is not going to float a commercial stretch. The bike paths are irrelevant to it, and are just an effect of shifting preferences among part of the bourgeois, erm… middle class.
The fact is that bike paths do not help local business en masse, but maybe a few kinds of them, and a lack of parking is not what is driving local stores into the ground – a ten-story mechanical parking garage across the street will not save you from the dust bin. The stuff that all the bike path advocates can get at a big box store will be gotten at the big box store, everything else one can order online will be delivered by UPS, and the local businesses competing with those modes will all die, the way steakhouses and magazine stores died due to social and economic changes. Bike paths have so little to do with any of this. They are the sesame seeds on the bun. They don’t wreak havoc, and they do not save the world.
Kate
Thank you for the analysis, bob.
CE
This is just me but I bike everywhere most of the year and the amount of shopping I’ve done on St-Denis has gone from almost zero to quite often since the REV opened. I don’t even do all my shopping on St-Denis by bike but the fact that I commute along that stretch has made me much more aware of what is on offer and the quieting of the street has made me more likely to want to walk there (or eat/drink on a terrace).
DeWolf
Echoing CE — since the REV has opened I’ve gone from spending zero dollars per year on St-Denis to spending, well, a lot more than that. There have even been times when I’ve passed by Quai des brumes when a band was doing its soundcheck in the afternoon and gone back for the show in the evening. That probably wouldn’t have happened before because I was almost never on St-Denis and now I’m on it at least twice a day.
Anecdotal, of course, but the economic impact of a bike path is extremely hard to measure. I don’t think bob is right when he says it makes virtually no difference. There are other studies indicating cyclists and pedestrians spend more money on urban commercial streets than drivers. But you’d need a much broader and more rigorous study than the one cited in the article to really understand the impact.
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Kate
Mario Girard bewails the mess being made of the Place des Festivals at the peak of tourism season.
OtherChris
Hope it will look better in real life… the render gives Winners Home Decor section vibes.
steph
Ever since the pandemic, the escalators on the Place-des-Arts (PDA) side of the passage to Place Desjardins have been a never-ending construction project. If one escalator wasn’t under repair, the other one was. They seemed to have perfected the art of making sure at least one was always out of service.
A few months ago, both escalators were finally repaired and running. I honestly thought we’d reached the end of the saga.
And with last week’s demolition work, they closed the entire passage. It’s almost impressive how they manage to keep this passage inconvenient year after year. I want to hope it was just a temporary closure while they had the heavy machinery aboveground… I want to hope!
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Kate
A recent report by city ombudsman Nadine Mailloux criticizes the development of a bike path in Park Ex under Projet for not inquiring into or taking into consideration the presence of people with mobility issues.
su
I wonder how she deals with snow shovelling and moving her car for street cleaning and snow removal in her condition of old age.
Mike
Funny how people with mobility issues only come up when it’s bikelanes on the line. Haven’t seen anyone worry too much about people on mobility scooters having to wade in traffic in the part of Jean Talon east of Saint Michel.
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Kate
Radio-Canada talks to the group resisting the enlargement of tennis facilities at Jarry Park.
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