The city has a new plan for calming traffic on the Camillien-Houde: concrete barriers to deter U-turners (a bad U-turn having sparked this whole process), bollards and flower boxes, and traffic lights at the top.
Updates from May, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
The new bridge has lighting effects built in, and some drivers had a preview of the effects Tuesday night.
SteveQ
Oh, I didn’t expect that. Seems like a nice lighting effect. This will make it even more beautiful.
Kevin
Ten years from now we’ll be condemning this, the Jacques Carter, and Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites as light pollution.
Blork
Nice! Probably not a light pollution problem because the lights don’t appear to be pointing up, and they are most likely LED and can be toned down easily.
While I’m not a fan of LED being used for street lighting, it has great potential for things like this, where it illuminates beautiful objects and landmarks without using much electricity. You see this on highway 132 in Longueuil, where the new passerelle that opened last year (the replacement for the one that was knocked down by a dump truck a few years ago) is nicely lit at night. In that particular case I think the lights are a bit too bright. It’s mostly indirect, but when you’re very close to it you get a brief blast of direct lighting. If the LEDs were half as bright it would have worked just as well without providing those harsh blasts if you look at it a certain way from a certain spot.
Faiz Imam
These are nice, but I’m really interested in what the lighting situation for the cable stay towers will be. That’s the most striking part of the bridge and needs to be lit correctly to look its best. A lot of different ways they could do it.
-
Kate
People in the West Island want to start a class-action suit against the airport for noise. Global says they’re asking for “financial settlement due to damages caused by aircraft noise pollution.”
In another story, CBC uses the word “damages” correctly in the headline, but drops the ball in the lede: “a pothole so big it caused more than $1,200 in damages to Eric Choueke’s car.”
Damage is what happens to things. It’s an uncountable noun. Journalists like to sound clever by saying “damages” happened to things, but they don’t. Damages is a legal term defining what one person or entity is ordered to pay another as restitution for damage established to have been done.
Ephraim
It’s doubtful that they would win a class-action against the airport. Firstly, because the airport was there before the houses were. And two, because the airport keeps track of the noise and noise corridors and airplanes are getting quieter and quieter all the time.
Blork
Hmm. I’m not so sure. The airport has expanded significantly, so that might count for something.
Regarding planes getting quieter, that’s also not much of a solution, as they’ve basically gone from OMG THIS IS SO LOUD MY HEAD IS GOING TO EXPLODE to OMG THIS IS SO LOUD. A bit like when the kid across the street is blasting his music at 11 and then he turns it down to 9; still too loud.
I live right under the flight path, but in Longueuil, so it’s the downwind leg and a good 30km from touchdown, and the planes are at least 1000 metres up when they fly over (usually more). It’s not loud enough to be disturbing, but it makes me wonder what it’s like when the plane is right over your house at 100 or 200 metres. And that’s landing when the engines are basically at idle. Taking off is a whole other thing; sometimes when a plane from PET flies over my house on takeoff it’s loud enough that I have to raise my voice a bit if I’m talking. That’s in Longueuil. WTF is it like in Dorval or Pointe-Claire?
qatzelok
There’s also the problem that the suburban form does almost nothing to mitigate noise. Lawnmowers, traffic and other ambiant noises are also audible from most bungalows. City blocks can be designed to create sound barriers, whereas empty lawns and houses scattered at odd angles to one another do nothing for urban noise.
The easiest thing to do would be to demolish the parts of the West Island that are noise sewers for the airport.
-
Kate
TVA has a very brief item on an orange line stoppage Tuesday evening. Odd thing, I was coming home at that time, the train stopped at Sherbrooke and an official announcement said it would be there for an hour (the 22:10 mentioned in the item). Some people sighed and left the train, but then the driver came on and said more or less “hang in there, we’ll be under way in a minute” and we were. So I don’t know what was up there.
-
Kate
I find it odd that the CBC is reporting on two sailors stranded on a ship in Quebec City without mentioning that this is not the first time it’s happened in a port on the St. Lawrence. The mayor of Sorel put up a fundraising page to help a group of stranded Turkish sailors get home in 2014.
Reply