The transport ministry announced Friday that five kilometers of the Met will be rebuilt starting around 2024. It’s a key section from St‑Laurent Boulevard out to Provencher, east of Pie‑IX.
Updates from January, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Mordecai Richler’s widow Florence has died at age 90. She would be the woman played by Rosamund Pike in Barney’s Version, more or less.
Michael Black
I looked, she was his second wife.
And Daniel was her son, but his father was her previous husband.
Noah and the other three kids were the children of Florence and Mordecai.
I never did know why Noah said to me in 1976 “So you’re Michael Black”. That was after he suddenly apoeared at school, decades later I read he’d been kicked out of a private school.
Kate
Michael, as I recall, the element in the novel that was more or less biographical was that Richler met his second wife as he was marrying his first, and was instantly smitten with her, but hardly in a position to pursue her at that moment. This happens to Barney in the novel (and movie). Eventually they both divorced their first spouses and married each other.
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Kate
Septimus Neverson, who has a charge sheet a mile long of crimes around Montreal culminating in a murder in Laval in 2006, was found guilty Friday of crimes automatically condemning him to 25 years’ prison before any possibility of parole. As Louis-Samuel Perron writes in La Presse, at 57, there’s a long chance Neverson never leaves prison.
Michael Black
You never know. A certain killer was 52 in 1992, and it’s 27 years later. I think we’d have heard if he died. He’s not been in the news much lately, his classification of “vexatious litigant” probably helped, though ironically I see a 2019 story that the Federal Court of Appeals has upheld that status.
I check every so often since it’s been over 25 years, which I think.makes him eligible for parole. But an old and lonely man.
Kate
Yes, you’re quite right, Michael. I doubt that man will ever demonstrate the kind of reform that parole boards like to see.
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Kate
Le Devoir is marking its 110th year Friday with a front page in the design of 1910 and a look back at some notable fronts over the last century-plus-10.
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Kate
A vigil was held at Concordia Thursday evening to honour the victims of the plane crash in Iran.
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Kate
Montreal photojournalist Ivanoh Demers happened to be in Haiti working on a piece about Dany Laferrière for La Presse when the 2010 earthquake struck. Many of the initial photos seen in media around the world were taken by him. There’s also a video interview on Radio‑Canada, where he now works.
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Kate
A water main leak has caused a big hole to open up at Guy and René-Lévesque and has swallowed a sidewalk. I can’t tell exactly from the pictures shown, but is it not on the border of a construction site, and therefore more on the contractor than the city to fix it?
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Kate
The Journal says Denis Coderre and Robert Poëti may join forces to wrest city hall back from Valérie Plante. There’s little more here about their plans, but theirs would certainly be a car‑centric vision of the city – in fact, the next election will probably be all about cars.
Jack
Good call on cars and sadly they never lose. This blog has asked this question before. What is it about our relationship to the car? It is visceral and profound , why? I am sincerely curious because I have never owned one.
Joey
Plante as mayor and Coderre as Liberal PM would be (a pipedream but also) kind of ideal for Montreal, no? He could fund the pink line since he’d get the credit for bringing it into existence even if it was Planet/PM’s idea. I suspect Coderre would do well in a provincewide election…
Chris
They are comfortable, and take you wherever you want, quickly, without physical effort.
Kate
Who, Coderre and Poëti?
nau
“take you wherever you want, quickly” That hasn’t necessarily been my experience when I’ve driven in Montreal but that still doesn’t seem to stop people.
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Kate
The mayor had a high-profile meeting Thursday with Catherine McKenna, now federal infrastructure minister, about getting the city more money for public transit, but no promises are mentioned in this brief piece.
Ian Cordner 21:43 on 2020-01-10 Permalink
Demolish the whole damn thing!
Dhomas 07:13 on 2020-01-11 Permalink
Not sure about demolishing a major link in our transport infrastructure. However, I would have liked to see the government start to move the highway underground. Having the elevated highway is really ugly, dirty, and cumbersome to anyone not in a car. I can just imagine all the space that would be liberated if it was underground instead (put some parks up above!). But it seems no government is keen to do that kind of project since Boston’s Big Dig debacle, though.
Spi 09:45 on 2020-01-11 Permalink
You can’t convert it to a tunnel, the met is also a national highway through which dangerous materials transit every day (since they aren’t allowed in tunnels they can’t take the 20)
Kate 10:01 on 2020-01-11 Permalink
If the fire that broke out on the Met in 2016 had happened in a tunnel, more than one person would’ve perished, it’s true.
Ephraim 14:36 on 2020-01-11 Permalink
Dhomas… you mean like the “Big Dig” in Boston?
Filp 20:24 on 2020-01-11 Permalink
The big dig in Boston was transformative, but people have to remember that it was right through downtown Boston, which justified the project. We already have our big dig equivalent, which would be the Ville Marie and Viger tunnels. If Boston’s elevated highway was away from the city center like the Met is, they wouldn’t have sunk so much money into tunneling it, which is prohibitively expensive. Burying the met on that stretch would also probably make the big dig look like a bargain, considering the length would be almost twice as long (5km vs 2.5km according to Wikipedia).
Jonathan 09:03 on 2020-01-12 Permalink
If they are going to keep it more or less as an elevated highway, I would like to see them reorganise the columns so that busses could run on a dedicated lane underneath. I’ve seen this in many cities and it really does make sense. I would also love if the MTQ recognised that this goes through a very urbanised area and plant some damn trees along the met side as well as the cremazie sides (not sure who has jurisdiction of cremazie)
Jack 11:10 on 2020-01-12 Permalink
@ Flip the Big Dig cost 15 billion dollars and solved nothing , Boston traffic was just pushed farther out. I think the only way long term is to do two things , raise the gas tax and build no new auto infrastructure.
https://www.wired.com/2008/11/youve-got-to-ha/
qatzelok 11:44 on 2020-01-12 Permalink
I understand the need for the Met for 18-wheelers and other commercial transportation. But we have to get all the single-passenger commuters off it:
They have destroyed several neighborhoods (of St-Michel, St-Leonard, VSL, Parc X) with bad traffic manners, dangerous callousness towards the locals, and the accelarated deterioration of city streets in the very places where the locals don’t have the money to keep repaving them (for the uncaring and unpaying suburban zombies).
DeWolf 13:55 on 2020-01-12 Permalink
Here’s an idea: if the MTQ insists on rebuilding the Metropolitan, make sure Crémazie is traffic calmed so it isn’t such a horrible and dangerous street for pedestrians. Then open some markets in the space beneath the elevated structure: flower markets, flea markets, farmers markets. It’s an all-weather space that is currently being wasted on parking, and if Crémazie wasn’t such a traffic sewer, it could serve as a point of connection between the surrounding neighbourhoods, rather than a barrier.