The city’s lawyers are fed up with the slowness of negotiations for a raise and plan to picket on December 11.
Updates from December, 2019 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The driver of a delivery truck was shot Monday afternoon as he drove along a service road at the Met near Langelier, apparently the victim of a case of serious road rage. His injuries are not life-threatening. TVA has a bit of video showing the truck just before the shooting, but they admit they’re not sure whether the car seen beside it is the vehicle from which the shots came. Nobody’s been arrested.
Story makes a nice sequel to today’s earlier posting about patience at difficult intersections.
Update: 24 hours later, there’s no clue to the identity of the shooter. All the cops know is it might be someone in that white car in the video, but it’s an anonymous-looking vehicle and you can’t see any part of the licence plate.
JP
Somebody must have seen this happen…and should at least be able to confirm whether it was the white car. I really hope the shooter is caught. It’s frightening to know that someone so impulsive with no self-control is driving around out there. It’s not even just road rage; violence can be carried out in many different places or situations.
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Kate
We had a military museum here, out at the corner of Langelier and Hochelaga. But the building has become decrepit so it has closed. In the photo, the building looks like a shed.
Did any reader ever visit this place? I’ve seen it mentioned once or twice on lists of city museums, but it never crossed my mind to go have a look.
qatzelok
Nobody is pretending the “Montrealers” (in the city) don’t drive. Their parked cars clog up all our roads and prevent rapid snow clearance.
All car traffic is poison for our society. But the suburbanite alone in his SUV racing to work every day, is another animal.
Some suburbanites live right here on the island of Montreal, but feel no connection to its citizens or special places. Diconnected, uncaring, anti-social car-addicts are a major scourge, and yes, some of this species resides among the cyclists and pedestrians of the central city. But the proportion in suburbia is much higher – as is the percentage of resraurants that are almost purely take-out.
It’s a drive-thru existence.
Orr
On the north side of that base is an retired airplane on display to passersby and as far as I can tell, the only such airplane on public display in all of Montreal, which is a shame since Montreal is a global aviation manufacturing centre for the past 80 years with many many thousands of aircraft built here.
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Kate
Quebecor writer complains that the traffic light at Pie-IX and Henri-Bourassa makes drivers wait too long, with a claim inside that it’s deliberately set to frustrate drivers and keep them out of the city. Fluidity of motor traffic is understood here to be the general good while public transit and pedestrians are simply obstacles to be wished away.
What kills me is that, in a car, a person is in a bubble – presumably comfortable, warm, listening to whatever sound source they prefer – yet they have no patience for those of us outside trudging through the weather. We’re the ones that have to get out of their way, tabarnak.
Meezly
Funny, just reading an opinion piece from G&M asking why it’s still OK that cars kill?
“The obstacle now is complacency, the acceptance of collisions as a part of life. The injuries and fatalities caused by motor vehicles have become less important than drivers’ need to get places, fast.”
Not sure if it’s more reassuring or less that Montreal is not alone in this collective mindset.
qatzelok
Meezly, that Globe article is a good antidote to the fake-journalism TVA car-ad that Kate linked to above.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-why-is-it-okay-that-cars-kill/
Juanita Jackson
You are basing these very sensible observations on your experiences being there but what about when you – or any other pedestrian – weren’t there? The vast majority of time motorists spend at traffic lights is just wasted waiting for nothing and nobody and that’s a giant collective waste for productivity, efficiency and even clean air. Indeed the Unabomber was inspired to commit terrorism after realizing he was sitting at a red light in the middle of the night for no reason, it was an example of corrosive government control over his sovereignty and natural right to progress where he wanted to go. The situation needs to be fixed to allow people to progress sensibly when possible.
Blork
At the risk of sounding like I’m siding with the Unabomber, I will confirm that driving a car isn’t always the warm comfortable bubble it might seem like to non-drivers. In fact, driving can be quite stressful, particularly in Montreal where you are surrounded by so many idiot drivers, plus there are all the worries about pedestrians and cyclists in your blind spots. For the past few years there is the non-stop irritation (which can explode into outrage very easily) at the huge amount of detours, re-routes, and other confusion from all the construction, which can throw you off your route and put you in a situation where you don’t know how to get to your destination or when you might get there.
Add to that the inching along, feeling like it’s taking forever to get anywhere, and not infrequently this seems to be caused either by some other idiot having done something stupid and therefore causing a jam, or gridlock, etc., or it’s because of seemingly arbitrary detours or “no left turn” signs (seriously, you can sometimes drive for ten blocks before you can make a left turn). And then you find yourself at a red light that takes five solid minutes to turn green, and 30 seconds later you’re at another red light that takes five minutes to turn green, then 30 seconds later you’re at another red light that takes five minutes to turn green, then 30 seconds later you’re at another red light that takes five minutes to turn green (getting frustrated yet?). All this made worse when the five minutes (or ten, or fifteen, or twenty) that you’ve spent at red lights have been met with zero perpendicular traffic.
Add to this your three-year-old in the back seat threatening to barf at any minute and your 1-year-old screaming at the top of its lungs, plus your dog is whimpering because he needs to pee, your phone won’t stop ringing and you can’t answer it because you’re driving, and you just got a text that your house is on fire and the gangster you have tied up in the trunk is trying to kick his way out and it’s making a real racket.
So no, driving isn’t very relaxing.
qatzelok
We drive so that we can live in plywood boxes in the middle of nowhere, far from our friends, families, and activities that give life meaning.
Is all the complaining about driving ‘not being as fun as it’s supposed to be’ – supposed to make people want to help you to drive faster and across public parks?
“I spend all this money and I’m still supposed to stop at red lights and let pedestrians cross? WTF! ( :
Raymond Lutz
Pendant ce temps, de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique:
“J’aime la voiture, j’adore la voiture (…) La voiture, c’est la liberté et tous ceux qui la condamnent devraient se souvenir de ce qu’était l’Union Soviétique (…) La voiture c’est la France (…) c’est notre culture.”
B.Lemaire, ministre Français de l’Économie
Kevin
There are 750,000 vehicles registered by the 1,950,000 people living on this island. At 2.5 people per household, that’s a car for every home.
The people driving in Montreal live in Montreal.
jeather
Presumably many people who live in the suburbs have friends and family who also live in the suburbs,often the exact same suburb.
Raymond Lutz
“The people driving in Montreal live in Montreal.” Geez… je me demande bien où habitent les conducteurs des 1.1 millions de véhicules qui traversent les ponts chaque jour?
http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/url/ITEM/1119CF953C3EB02CE0530A930132B02C
Blork
Actually, CBC radio had a news story this morning about a recent study of commuting, and (if my memory serves me), more than half of Montreal suburbanites work either in their own suburb or in another suburb. Also, there is a significant percentage of Montrealers who work either in a different borough or in a suburb.
Basically, the study put the kibosh to the old notion that “commuting” is entirely a matter of suburbanites coming into downtown every morning and heading back to the suburbs at night. Not so! Most of those cars you see swirling around Montreal are driven by Montrealers, not suburbanties. Fully 50% of suburbanites who work downtown commute by public transit.
I can’t find a link to the story on CBC’s website. However, I will say that this comes as no surprise to me. There are jobs galore in the suburbs, and they’re not all taken buy suburbanites. Anyone looking at any of those bridges during commuting hours knows that there are almost as many cars heading OUT of the city in the morning as there are going in. I know of Mile-enders working in Laval, Plateauites working in Longueuil, NDGers working in Brossard, etc.
Kevin
@Raymond Lutz
Well, my wife is one of them as she drives from Montreal to Kahnawake.
But let me be clear instead of being sarcastic: The people on this blog need to stop pretending that *only* suburbanites drive.
Montrealers own cars and drive. All those cars parked in the Plateau overnight are owned by people who live in the Plateau.Blork
The CBC story has finally showed up on the web site:
Public transit, suburban travel redefine Montreal’s typical commute
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/commuter-changes-statscan-montreal-1.5381514
Raymond Lutz
Quelqu’un a-t-il consulté les données de Statistique Canada pour l’article mentionné par Blork? Sont très mal définis (sinon pas du tout) les notions de “city core” et de “suburbs” ….
As for the asymmetrical flow of commuters, it seems far more pronounced than Blork’s “there are almost as many cars heading OUT of the city in the morning as there are going in.”
The statscan data shows the “traditional commute (outside-to-inside city core)” is FIVE FOLD the “reverse commute (inside-to-outside city core)” (as anyone looking at any of those bridges during commuting hours can observe…).
But is the city core simply a 5 km circle around the town hall? “The city centre is defined as the census tract where the city hall is located.” Really?
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Kate
The handsome old Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice was decommissioned when the Grande bibliothèque opened nearby, but despite several announcements of plans – the latest being an “innovation library” for teenagers – it’s still closed and won’t reopen for at least another three years. Projected costs have skyrocketed.
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