Why Montreal can’t be a city of the car
Terse but cromulent urbanist op-ed in La Presse gives two reasons Montreal can’t be a city of the car: it’s too dense, and the city centre is too residential.
A less terse urbanist op-ed in Le Devoir asks who the city belongs to – the people who work in it, or the people who sleep in it?
DeWolf 11:42 on 2020-09-11 Permalink
The op-ed in Le Devoir is infuriating. First he accuses Valérie Plante of being Trumpian in character (huh?) and then goes on to say she is too ‘montréalocentrique’. I’m sorry, but it’s part of the job description for the mayor of Montreal to be Montrealcentric. She has no business serving the citizens of St-Lambert or Terrebonne or Mirabel – people who may think they have some claim to Montreal, but who don’t live here, don’t pay taxes and don’t vote in local elections.
If this is the kind of stuff he was teaching in his urban planning classes at UdeM then it’s no wonder why we had some disastrous urban planning policies in decades past.
David777 16:18 on 2020-09-11 Permalink
The tabula rasa of Griffintown is fairly autocentric, a major mistake. Back during the initial public info sessions at ETS (2008, I want to say), I asked Serge Goulet whether they had considered car-free buildings to keep costs down and boost affordability, he did this hand waive and said nobody would buy them, and that the proposal already had fewer spaced than anticipated demand called for. It’ll take action on the city’s part to limit off street parking, and we should have a ratchet type plan to keep reducing parking maximums in new construction each year. Force the builders and the people to be ‘free,’ in the Rousseauian sense of the word.
Once the car is largely evacuated from daily use in the lived of central city dwellers, and the number of said dwellers is sufficiently high, our businesses will feel confident that they don’t need drive-in customers to survive. And a major fifth column for the suburbanites will fall away.
At least, one lives in hope.