La Presse informally asked Montreal readers whether they favour the Legault government keeping Montreal as a Covid red zone, and found that a majority supports his decision.
Updates from March, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Some thoughts from managers of SDCs about how the pandemic has changed the use of public space and may have accelerated an already existing trend to offer more space to pedestrians around commercial streets.
Some merchants and residents in Hochelaga want this summer’s pedestrianization of Ontario Street to go further than planned.
DeWolf
What’s happening on Ontario seems to be a reflection of a divide that exists on many streets: cafés, bars and restaurants want pedestrianization because they can install extra large terrasses, whereas many retail stores don’t want to lose parking.
I wonder if the stores that oppose pedestrianization actually have data on how their customers get there, or if they’re making assumptions based on the store owner’s preferred mode of transport. I can see streets like St-Laurent being a major destination for people from all over the city, but Ontario? Who drives there from outside the neighbourhood to go shopping?
Kate
DeWolf, I can’t find a link for the moment, but there was a recent study that showed most people shopping on Mont-Royal when it was pedestrianized in the summer were from the local area, and had simply walked over. I’ll pop a link in when I find it.
DeWolf
Yes, I remember that. But I think it was actually a study of the street pre-pandemic, which showed that, even in normal times, only about 10% of people got there by car.
steph
St-Laurent/St-Denis/Mt-Royal/Duluth used to have their cach/ value when they were the only streets of that type in the region. Now we have Masson, Wellington, Ontario etc that fulfil the same needs. Shopping on St-Catherine (which used to have the exclusive boutique stores) has similarly been killed by the Dix30 & Carrefour Laval/Balinvilles being build everywhere. What used to be exclusive to the city, is far from exclusive anymore. No one drives to these places anymore – parking ISN”T what killed it.
Kate
Right. So here’s my question. Montreal is having growing pains, obviously. We used to be a city with a single commercial nucleus, around Ste-Catherine, and now we’ve got a bunch, some on older neighbourhood main streets, as steph says here, and some major malls. This didn’t happen overnight. There are photos showing St-Hubert as a glitzy, neon-spangled main street from the 1940s onward. Norgate, generally regarded as the oldest mall in town, opened in 1950 near what’s now Côte-Vertu metro.
What I want to know is: did London, Paris, Hong Kong, New York, other big cities, suffer this much as they got bigger? Is there some psychological barrier here to do with being an island, and things being clearly demarcated as on or off the island? Or is it that those older, bigger cities simply got big before the car was the dominant force in civic life?
Kevin
I could write an essay about Manhattan and New York and the ease of driving and owning a car, and the highrise apartments with courtyard BBQs and splashpads, and the total mixed-use buildings, and go on for pages.
I think it’s a city in a constant state of flux, with developers snapping up multiple buildings in order to tear them down and build new, because there is no other place to build.
Montreal has been largely stagnant for decades. It’s flailed around with strict zoning, corruption, the failed merger and demerger, and a provincial government that thwarts it at every turn.
And it’s surrounded by empty space everywhere you look.Those other cities are places where geography is constrained and where people with power want things to work. Montreal is not that lucky.
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Kate
There was a drive-by shooting Saturday afternoon in Rivière-des-Prairies, but the apparent targets (“known to police”) were not hit.
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Kate
The city planned carefully to keep snow removal crews separate this season. That, plus fairly mild-mannered weather, has meant no Covid-related snow removal crises. La Presse talks to the city’s snow czar.
Ephraim 12:07 on 2021-03-07 Permalink
I would like some numbers, trends, something associated with the decision, so we know when we get out of the red zone and when the curfew can change.
Ant6n 15:31 on 2021-03-07 Permalink
How bout making rules that make sense.
Like nobody’s allowed to visit anybody at home, but you can go to restaurants.
Ephraim 16:16 on 2021-03-07 Permalink
And if you want to go to a restaurant in an orange zone, you have to have ID showing that you are local? So, if I move to St Louis de Ha Ha, I can’t eat at a restaurant until I’m a resident?
Blork 23:10 on 2021-03-07 Permalink
Thing is, “making sense” is highly subjective. For people living in smaller communities that don’t have many restaurants or for working-class people who don’t have a lot of money to spare, it “makes sense” to visit your old sister/cousin/uncle/doppelgänger/nemesis/evil twin (etc.) at home, over a cup of tea, instead of having to cross town and go to a restaurant.
Blork 23:11 on 2021-03-07 Permalink
(I’m not saying people should do that; just commenting on the subjective nature of what makes sense.)
Ant6n 06:59 on 2021-03-08 Permalink
Blork, I think we’re saying the same thing. Individual Visits at home make more sense than gathering in restaurants, but that’s not the rule in Quebec. Which doesn’t make sense from a pandemic containment perspective. For the caq, psych health is less important than the economy.
Take out from restaurants would be a reasonable compromise. Limiting instead of forbidding the number of personal interactions would be as well.