Local journalist Taylor C. Noakes has a new piece on CityLab about the difficulties around closing off the Camillien-Houde to drivers. It’s always interesting to read good pieces which attempt to explain Montreal’s and Quebec’s difficulties to others.
Updates from April, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
City hall speaker Cathy Wong has left the opposition Ensemble Montréal party to sit as an independent.
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Kate
A woman in her sixties fell off a platform and died in an east-end worksite Monday.
qatzelok
Notre Dame and Dickson is in Mercier, right? Or, just east of Hochelega-Maisonneuve.
“East End” includes way too much territory to be meaningful.Kate
In a case like this, I figure if anyone’s sufficiently interested in the story, they will go read the whole thing with more detail including the location.
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Kate
The current owner of the site of the demolished Redpath House has an unusual plan: he wants to build a structure that will be partly privately occupied, partly used as exhibition and storage space by the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s the kind of notion that could have lawyers squabbling over zoning for years.
It’s also hard not to imagine that this owner sees a way to get a fancier building than he could otherwise afford, possibly with tax breaks.
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Kate
The SPVM’s education of its force to deal with mentally disturbed people is a one-day class only and yet the force has delayed implementing anything like it for years, and still won’t have everyone trained before three years are out. This is kind of lame.
Update: Some advocacy groups agree with me.
Blork 11:26 on 2019-04-10 Permalink
Nice article, but Noakes makes the very common mistake of bringing up Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Central Park in New York and implying they are more “car free” than Mont-Royal Park just because they recently closed some roads to car traffic. This is untrue; all those measures did was bring those parks to a position that is roughly equivalent to where Mont-Royal already is and has been for years.
Let’s ignore the fact that 90% of Camillien-Houde is peripheral to the park (separating the park from the cemeteries) because the cemeteries are park-like and are sort of de-facto part of the park. Even with that consideration, Mont-Royal Park is already as car-free as both Prospect Park and Central Park.
Mont-Royal Park has a network of roads (all called “Chemin Olmstead,” because Montreal). Chemin Olmstead is car-free except for service vehicles. The only street that allows cars is the one street that crosses the park: Camillien-Houde.
Prospect Park has a network of roads called “park drives,” including West Drive, Center Drive, and Well House Drive. They run through the park the way Chemin Olmstead runs through Mount Royal Park. When Prospect Park went “car-free” it meant they banned cars from the park drives. It did NOT ban cars from Flatbush avenue, a major artery which runs right through the park from the east end to the north (similar to Camillien-Houde).
Central Park has an extensive network of roads, most of which have always been car free. They recently banned cars from two larger roads (West Drive and East Drive), which are roughly equivalent to Mont-Royal Park’s Chemin Olmstead. However, there are four “transverse” roads which cross the park from east to west (65th Street, 79th Street, 85th Street, and 97th Street) which are NOT car-free (and are very busy with traffic), similar to Camillien-Houde.
So as you can see, both of those other parks have small streets within the park that are car free, plus at least one car-permitted street that crosses through the park. That is exactly what Mont-Royal Park had before all this started, so it is utterly false to invoke those parks as being more car-free than Mont-Royal.
qatzelok 12:51 on 2019-04-10 Permalink
I find it really sad and colonial when locals refer to USA cities as some kind of model for us peasants to follow, rather than the cautionary tales that they actually are.
“Let’s look at what Flint is doing with water treatment, and what Phoenix has done to its suburban regions, and then compare ourselves positively.”