St-Denis totally sans cars, in pictures
Interesting visual mockup of how St-Denis Street could look if there were trams, a bike path and sidewalks, but no cars. Not that anyone’s seriously proposing this – yet.
Interesting visual mockup of how St-Denis Street could look if there were trams, a bike path and sidewalks, but no cars. Not that anyone’s seriously proposing this – yet.
Etienne 18:05 on 2019-06-11 Permalink
Pretty cool, however the place where I would see a tram the most would be St Laurent, from the north to all the way to the south shore!
Would help revitalize the street and maybe bring some relief to the orange line.
Kate 18:23 on 2019-06-11 Permalink
Etienne, I think it would be silly to run a tram on St-Denis because it’s too closely duplicating the orange line. The reason the 30 and 31 buses normally run only twice an hour, all day, is lack of demand. I think it’s more an exercise in making St-Denis more attractive. It really does have too much traffic to be a pleasant walking street, and you’ll notice they never close it for sidewalk sales as they do with Masson, St-Laurent or Mont-Royal.
Ephraim 18:36 on 2019-06-11 Permalink
Holy bad design. A sitting place between the trams that you need to walk across the tram line to go to? Why don’t we just set up a lawsuit! And why bother paving it at all? Trams don’t need pavement beneath them. If anything, you can put the trams close together and put up a barrier so that people don’t walk across the tracks, since the can’t stop as quickly.
dwgs 18:57 on 2019-06-11 Permalink
Ephraim I don’t know why you’re so intent on not paving the tramway. You can’t leave it like a railbed because wheelchairs, strollers, bikes can’t get over it and it’s a tripping hazard. Leaving it as gravel, earth, or grass would lead to major problems with mud, erosion, etc. What do you propose instead of pavement?
Ian 19:40 on 2019-06-11 Permalink
I think maybe we are forgetting that streetcars are really heavy. We aren’t getting lightweight “trams” in Montreal. All the railbeds in Toronto (for instance) are solid concrete on a bed of gravel. I had the joy of living on Queen street when they redid the streetcar tracks one year, and it goes down about 5 feet.
Ephraim 19:42 on 2019-06-11 Permalink
You don’t want people, wheelchairs, strollers or bikes to cross over the tramlines, it’s dangerous. You want them to cross at intersections. So you put the rails in, but leave grass between them. It’s an unconscious way of telling people that it’s NOT their zone. The other solution is to pave it, but with river rock, for example, so that it’s rough and people don’t want to cross it. Many European cities do this including Frankfurt, Rotterdam, the Czech republic and Strasbourg. Do a search for trams on grass. Plenty of pictures of them.
Ian 20:13 on 2019-06-11 Permalink
That’s very nice. How many of those cities get 3 inches of ice at a time? Streetcar beds need to be built to certain specifications to hold up to the weather. But who are we kidding, the construction here is so corrupt and incompetent they will screw it up anyway so what the hell, plant flowerbeds of cannabis. Who cares.
Ephraim 07:31 on 2019-06-12 Permalink
If we can’t do it, that’s fine.. then put in uneven stone underneath. You need something to remind people that it’s not a sidewalk and it’s not a road… that trams come by at any time. Anything other than pavement.
Blork 09:54 on 2019-06-12 Permalink
I tend to agree with Ephraim; if it were paved, people would use it as a bike path. Or for pushing baby strollers. Because stupid.
Ephraim 11:29 on 2019-06-12 Permalink
Look up Queens Quay Tunnel (Toronto) images on Google Images… and see how many stupid cars, not paying attention go into that tunnel. And yet, they don’t need even pavement underneath a streetcar, so if it was river rock underneath… the vibration alone would stop people. They can also put up a fence between the two directions to keep people from crossing the street… but that doesn’t stop cyclists from driving on it, nor stupid cars… because it’s “clear”. Or, I guess you could narrow the track, so cars don’t fit, but then you need specialized trams.