City must OK additional $6M for winter
The winter just past – a long one, which started November 13 and ended with an April snowstorm – is costing the city an additional $6 million for snow removal. Fluctuating temperatures and resulting icy conditions also meant more salt and gravel work.
Ian 12:28 on 2019-04-24 Permalink
This amidst plans to not actually bother repairing potholes in any serious way.
“The City of Montreal says it is going to scale back road repairs and focus on long-term construction designed to make the city more “livable.”
In other words, the city is going to cut back on patching potholes, and will instead spend money on rebuilding roads and increasing the number of bicycle lanes, widening sidewalks, and planting trees.
Many roads are currently being repaved to extend their life cycle by an average of ten years. The Plante administration said it wants to refocus its efforts on roads that need to be completely rebuilt and use the occasion to redesign them, as it did on Papineau, north of the metropolitan.”
While this is a nice idea to beautify the city and focus on major roadworks, the entire length of Hutchison, to take one example, is a mess of potholes top to bottom – there are even potholes on the speedbumps. Not just little patches, but actual holes to the bottom of the roadbed.
newsflash: bicyclists are also affected by potholes, it’s not just the evil cars and trucks. In personal experience, I blew out my front tire on one a couple of years ago – fortunately it was a side street (on Hutchison), I wasn’t going very fast, and there was no traffic to fall into – but there are major potholes all up and down Parc, Saint Larry, & Saint Urbain – effectively all the major north-south streets in Mile End. Beaubien is a serious mess of deep, unavoidable potholes right where the Van Horne bike path starts, Bernard & Saint Viateur are falling apart – I’ve seen the city just place traffic cones in the deepest holes and leave it at that for weeks at a time… But good news, they put major work into bike paths in on Clark & Jeanne Mance, no need to worry about the potholes on major streets /s – this administration has decided to stick with the old patch up the hole and hope for the best approach which is pennywise and pound foolish at best, we will see more ghost bikes chained to the pretty new urban furniture over the next few years I’m sure.
Joey 13:01 on 2019-04-24 Permalink
Maybe this is an unspoken admission that none of the contractors in this city will properly repair streets to prevent potholes from re-emerging soon after the work is done, so we might as well just make do with things as they are.
mare 15:33 on 2019-04-24 Permalink
Maybe the streets riddled with potholes will convince drivers to keep to the 30km/h speed limit. Hahahaha.
Ian 16:00 on 2019-04-24 Permalink
You’re absolutely right, mare, it’s clearly to the public benefit to leave the potholes. Maybe the city’s budget surplus from gentrification can go into more beautification stuff like building nicer tennis courts for the yuppies in Fletcher’s Field, or redoing the cycle path median on Clark that narrowed the street too much for fire trucks to pass.