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A garbage man was pinned by his own vehicle Tuesday afternoon in the Point when a minivan driver, described in both these pieces as having neglected to clear his windshield, rammed into the back of the truck.
Whatever else you can say about TVA, they went out and got a photo of the damaged van. CTV is running a stock picture of a police car and Global has a stock photo of a cop seen from behind in a visibility jacket, neither of which have any relevance or convey any information.
The city’s mobility squad has received additional funding and will be operating in all boroughs this spring. Metro’s piece collects snark from city opposition and some guy described as an expert in transportation planning.
Were the Tremblay or Coderre administrations blamed as harshly for road conditions and problems that largely derive from decades of poor planning, or no planning at all, as the Plante administration is?
Wonder if any West Island folks are going to be mad?
Some drivers are already mad. Some drivers transmit anger as a meme, as I noticed recently. I was being driven a short distance by someone who is a confident and calm driver. But a third person in the car is mercurial and reactive, and her responses to minor delays in traffic and her simmering anger about driving issues generally began to make the driver angry by association.
This is one reason I think media insistence on traffic “headaches” and “nightmares” is not helpful (but actually, I’ve seen those uses decline lately, so maybe I’m having a beneficial effect!). We are social creatures and we can control to an extent the attitudes we signal to others.
EmilyG, West Island folks should be happy. The squad ought to be doing something to ease traffic jams in the suburbs of Montreal (but not, I think, in the separate cities).
The Squad rarely hands out tickets (each member averages 2/week unless I’ve futzed up my math) so the only people getting mad should be the entitled douchebags blocking traffic.
I think I was wondering if WI folks would be mad, because I belong to a group of them online (used to live there) and it seems many of them often complain when anything happens that they think is anti-car. But I shouldn’t assume they’re all like that.
The expert in the Metro piece is a professor at a couple universities in the city and ran a consulting firm that did a lot of work around transportation planning. I had him for a few classes at Concordia, he knows his stuff.
CE, thanks for clarifying the man’s bona fides.
The ARTM has been asked by the transport ministry to set up a carpooling system to reduce the congestion inevitably coming when the REM construction and the L-H-Lafontaine tunnel work overlap. But why make this a temporary measure? I know some American cities have permanent carpooling lanes and a culture called slugging has grown up around it. Montreal may be attaining that kind of size and sprawl.
Unfortunately I don’t see slugging culture working very well here.
For one thing, it won’t be allowed to form and grow on its own, organically. Instead, some bureaucrat will be put in charge of it and a few million dollars will be spent on creating nonsensical signs, formulating rules that are hard to understand, and a Sid Lee campaign full of cutesy stick figures with love hearts for heads will be created with posters plastered all over the Metro and buses.
60% of cars will be disqualified for arbitrary reasons (no SUVs, no lone male drivers, no two-door vehicles, etc.) and anyone wanting to be a slug driver will have to apply for a slug sticker via a badly formed web site using outdated scripting that fails on most browsers (either that or bleeding-edge scripting that fails on most browsers). They will have to figure out which of seven categories they fit into and choose one of four incomprehensible “plans” they want to belong to. Then they’ll have to pass a series of tests and electronically agree to a 14-point (and 120 sub-point) terms of service agreement. Commuters who want to slug as passengers will also have to pass a similar battery of tests and agreements, plus they will have to specify where they will wait for their slug ride, under threat of fines if they ever wait anywhere else.
All users (drivers or passengers) will need to go to Berri/UQAM to get a photo-ID created between the hours of 10AM and 4PM, Monday to Friday.
Nope.
Blork, vous oubliez le système de notation mutuelle pour évaluer la qualité du voyage, la compagnie des autres sluggers, la propreté du véhicule et l’entrain de son conducteur. Technocrates are everywhere.
What Brick said but he forgot about the taxi drivers going bananas once again because people have been given another method of getting around.
I don’t see the Montreal cops doing the massive enforcement that an effective carpool lane program needs. That swiftly flowing lane presents a massive temptation to drivers sitting in gridlock without the required number of passengers. Montreal drivers do not handle temptation well. There has to be a very real possibility of a $500+ fine to keep people out of that lane. This means it has to be possible to pull cars over and write tickets during peak traffic without making things even worse.
These comments are all too depressingly accurate. Some things really are insanely backwards here. I don’t drive on the regular so never really realized that there aren’t HOV lanes here. This is the equivalent of not having garbage cans where you sort by type. Dark ages, man.
Blork, hilarious genius comment.
A camera enforcement system… working or not… would be a great deterrent. About a camera every 100m or so. Heck, if you do mail people the tickets, you could likely pay for a new roof on the stadium just from those tickets.
There are carpool lanes in Quebec. I know at least one in on the 15 North in Laval. No idea how/if they enforce it, probably by cop cars running after you.
Also on the 20 and on Sources. This is a not a new issue or solution, just the idea of the city sticking its fingers in that pie is new. Like Blork I have my doubts.
I believe strong enforcement and a requirement for 3+ people have been identified as factors in making Slugging a thing in Washington.
As for enforcement, there has been at least some of the Montreal-area ones.
At one point, reserved lanes here didn’t have much limitation. So a taxi was allowed if there was a passenger. It made no sense, and I wrote Richard Holden at the time, and the fact that I never got an answer made me dismiss his value as an MNA.
I don’t know if that’s changed.
Taxis are definitely allowed if they have a fare. The lane on the 20 seems to be mostly full of cabs bringing fares into town from the airport whenever I’m around there. I only carpool with one passenger as our schedules match up which isn’t always the case in my line of work, so we can’t go in the reserved lane but whatever, the traffic’s not that bad at the time of day we are there.
A Montreal filmmaker has been nominated for a short film Oscar for an Arabic-language piece called Brotherhood, set in Tunisia.
The city’s laying out cash for private lawyers to try to get back $4.7 million paid to a couple of engineering firms on a basis later determined to be fraudulent. This brief item suggests the city knows it’s a lot to pay but that it’s a matter of principle. (I also learned a French word I hadn’t yet encountered but which could’ve been used more often during the Tremblay era – dolosif.)
It seems kind of inevitable that Vélo Québec would award its first gold certification to Montreal for improvements in its cycling infrastructure.
More Tuesday on the state of our commercial streets as the city opens consultations on what it needs to do to help traditional shopping areas thrive.
The CBC article is misleading. It states that Ste-Catherine has a vacancy rate of 25%, but that is only for the SDC in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. The downtown portion has a vacancy rate of 12% according to Destination Centre-Ville (much lower than the overall downtown vacancy rate).
Good point.
Spin it how you like but 1 in 7 are empty on average. That’s unsustainable.
“Roughly 1,000 out of Montreal’s 7,000 street-level spaces remain empty. … A vacancy rate of between four and seven per cent is considered healthy, but some commercial arteries, like St-Denis St., have seen numbers soar to 26 per cent. Others, like Promenade Masson are at 6 per cent, and Promenade Fleury are at 7 per cent.” That’s nuts. Even our LOWEST vacancy rates are barely within the range of what is considered healthy.
Also consider that the Promenade Masson is between Iberville and 12th, and Promenade Fleury is Ahuntsic. Not exactly the downtown hub of activity St. Denis was meant to be.
…also note the Josh Wolfe quoted in that article is the same Josh Wolfe of Mile End Memories, he knows whereof he speaks. Worth noting those two businesses he refers to are both Shiller-Lavy properties.
Four workers at the Pinel Institute were seriously injured last week when an inmate with a violent history attacked them. The institution is rethinking the security measures available to workers coping with deranged and potentially violent inmates.
Blork 21:49 on 2020-01-14 Permalink
There are all sorts of things that can cause accidents. One of them is idiocy. This looks like a case of 100% idiocy. That driver should lose his license permanently.
Chris 09:43 on 2020-01-15 Permalink
But won’t.
qatzelok 10:10 on 2020-01-15 Permalink
When the roads get really slippery, SUV drivers tend to drive more aggressively, perhaps trying to imitate all those tire-spinning SUV ads you see whenever you try to read the news. I saw three life-threatening manouevres yesterday in a two-hour ride. I could have died three times.