Twitter user anouslesrues has a good thread about the plans to improve Pine Avenue, first from St-Denis to the Main, and then the Main to Park Avenue.
Updates from April, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A man was stabbed Wednesday evening in Rosemont’s Père-Marquette park. That’s pretty much the whole story.
mare
Ah, that’s why there were 10 cop cars next to the skate park. I thought they were preventing a party like the one there was yesterday, or urged people not to stand close to each other, or even hug and kiss.
Kate
Hug and kiss? What kind of world do you live in, mare?
mare
I see it quite regularly in Parc-Marquette while walking the dogs. People arriving at a group of their friends, all unmasked, and getting a hug and a peck. Young people just think they’re invincible. I try to just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ because I can’t convince them this is serious anyway, and not just an issue “for old people and those are vaccinated anyway”.
Maybe someone should make a daily TikTok* where they interview a young Montrealer who recently had Covid.
*Or wherever the 15 to 25 year olds are watching these days.GC
100%. It’s impossible to go out in public and not see at least a couple of people who meet up and do the unmasked bisous or ungloved handshake. Of course, you never know if they are from the same household, but if you live with someone and saw them that morning, do you squeal, hug, and kiss them when you see them in the park later that same day? If you’re not in a romantic partnership, probably not… I mean, why do you think we’re in this mess, to begin with?
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Kate
Rosemont borough is planning to emulate the Plateau by banning billboards on its territory.
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Kate
UQÀM and graduate Hélène Boudreau have come to an out-of-court settlement and she will take down any revealing photos that include the university branding.
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Kate
The city has so far held back the growth of Covid variants but public health is bracing for a rise in cases this month. Aaron Derfel’s latest Twitter thread sifts the numbers.
The premier is holding yet another presser Thursday at 5 p.m.
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Kate
Quebec plans to pour $1.2 billion into redoing highways around Montreal: “tout est mis en œuvre pour limiter les inconvénients pour les automobilistes” says Chantal Rouleau, the urban area’s CAQ mistress. The sum covers several things which were already announced, like work on the Ville-Marie and the L‑H‑Lafontaine tunnel, plus others listed in this piece.
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Kate
The teenager who was at the wheel in mid-March when an older woman was knocked down and left for dead is still locked up: she was awaiting trial on a robbery charge from January when the hit-and-run occurred, and the item suggests this was not her only previous brush with the law.
(I notice that the QMI writer here puts in “F**k!” which surprises me, since it’s been judged not offensive in French.)
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Kate
A 16-year-old has died of Covid at Ste-Justine, the youngest victim so far in Quebec. TVA tells us that the hospital only says that younger people who die from the virus tend to have existing health conditions.
Meezly
In an interview with La Presse last week, Arruda spelled out, with surprising candour, the province’s strategy to a younger journalist.
“If I have 2,000 [new] cases [a day] in Quebec, but we don’t have significant hospitalizations or deaths, we can live with that,” he said.
“Because older people are protected, we will, of course, have people your age who will find themselves in intensive care and die, which is horrible. But is it better if you close everything, and people break the rules in secret?”
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In other words, ‘Some of you may die – but that’s a chance we are willing to take.’ “MarcG
“But is it better if you close everything, and people break the rules in secret?” Ultimately, ummm.. yes?
ant6n
It does suck. Most Western countries did not deal with this situation well.
But given that we are here now, with most risk groups vaccinated, the question is how many people will die. I mean, a bunch of people die every year in road accidents, but few are willing to shut down all individual driving.
There are some other concern though, like the proliferation of more mutations, or the strain on the health care system if we have a third wave even just among young people.
Chris
> In other words, ‘Some of you may die – but that’s a chance we are willing to take.’ “
We do so for everything else, why not covid? We accept cars even though they kill some of us. We accept factories, even though the pollution kills some of us. We allow sugary drinks, even though obesity kills some of us. We do it for influenza even. It’s hard to say how many covid deaths is acceptable, but the answer isn’t zero.
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Kate
It’s a relatively minor issue compared to CDPQ-Infra running an elevated train through the heart of town, but people in Tétreaultville are not happy that a long-promised grocery store has been nixed by the REM, which has placed a reserve on the lot intended for the store.
Odd that the lede starts off “Le REM continue de bousculer l’administration de Valérie Plante” because this has nothing to do with city hall, and city hall has no leverage against it.
In fact, if I could offer Plante & Co. any advice this year, it’s to set out clearly which citizen grievances can be placed fairly at their door, and which are from Quebec’s high-handed meddling in how this city works. All over the place I see the city blamed for highway problems and now the REM, none of which is their doing, and little of which they can change, but so many people simply aren’t aware of the distinction.
Thomas
We live in a federal country, and Canadians still don’t understand who does what. Notwithstanding general ignorance, the idea that Valérie Plante invented orange cones (and everything else that’s supposedly wrong with this city) seems to be particularly pervasive. It really is quite maddening…
Bill Binns
Plante was elected on a big promise she had no power to fulfill (The pink line). She was going to “pressure the province” or “work with the province” or some such. It didn’t work for the Pink line but maybe she can use her awesome diplomatic skills to fix the REM and the Tetraultville food desert?
dhomas
@Bill, your apparent sarcasm aside, Plante was elected when the Liberal government was still in power. Love them or hate them, the Liberals still needed to listen to Montreal because they needed their votes.
The CAQ got elected almost entirely without the support of Montreal. Plante (or any other Montreal mayor, really) have no leverage with the current provincial government. This applies to the Pink line, the REM, or the grocery store. If anything, the grocery store might be salvageable because the CAQ has a bit of a foothold in Eastern Montreal that they might want to cultivate.ant6n
Remember, the REM proposal came out of Legault promising some light rail to the two Eastern ridings that voted CAQ. It makes very little sense from a cost-benefit point of view. There are two ridings out East that voted CAQ: Bourget, surrounding the Eastern end of the Green Line and Pointe-aux-Trembles further East. That second riding is basically getting a new metro line — but they only have a population of 40K, spread over a fairy large suburban area.
Total bus ridership of all the bus lines that exist out there (189, 187, 186, 86, 430, 182, 183) is like 22K riders per day – and a lot of that is probably local ridership in Tétreaultville feeding into the Green line, which won’t be affected by the REM. It’s kind of bizarre that the PM draws a line of the map and everybody rushes to build this line.
Anyway, it appears they later added that second Northern branch to the REM to capture a bunch of ridership and get a metro out to a bunch more people, which makes the proposal as a whole make a bit more sense.
Still, it’s a pretty wonky way of building transit for the next 50 years: PM wants to reward his own voters, pension fund adds a second branch to make this more economically viable together with the giant piles of subsidies that will get shoveled into this.
Chris
>Love them or hate them, the Liberals still needed to listen to Montreal because they needed their votes.
Alternatively, the Liberals *don’t* need to listen to Montreal because it always votes Liberal no matter what they do.
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Kate
A man has quit his job at the CDN-NDG borough, but the question here is: who sent his resignation letter to CTV and for what political advantage?
SMD
And to The Gazette, too.
Kevin
Kate
So this guy didn’t just quit his job, he made sure everyone knew about it?
A reader of my twitter feed responded to my headline “Worker quits CDN‑NDG borough, citing problems” with “Maybe the city councillor who calls him “Super Chad”?” (The fellow in question is called Chad Walcott.)
I’ll bet if we knew all the details, this CDN-NDG borough hassling would turn out to be the most petty office squabble in the world.
(Although I do recognize that office squabbles can be very oppressive, and loom very large, if you’re in the middle of them and they affect your livelihood.)
dwgs
Blow it up and start again. All the politicians, the civil servants, les cols bleus, the whole damn borough.
Kevin
Kate
I know a guy who knows a guy, (no names) and it looks like it came from someone else, not the guy who quit.John B
Hmm, a resignation letter addressed to the guy at the middle of the whole Sue Montgomery/NDG scandal, which happens to completely support his claims, gets leaked to the media? I wonder who could have possibly leaked it.
YUL514
The borough is in disarray, Walcott was asking for requests to be written to him by Montgomery and Harris, a totally acceptable request. I had given Montgomery the benefit of the doubt in the past but clearly there’s a battle between elected officials and the borough employees. At the end of the day the citizens pay the price.
We can theorize all we want with what is going on but we’ll never know the real story. I’m sure Sue is trying to make things run better at the borough but it seems like it has gotten to the point where she has taken up some serious personal vendettas which have not allowed her to properly do what she was elected for.
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Kate
Police aren’t certain yet whether the indigenous man found dead on Sunday was a homicide victim. Brian Vollant was in Montreal for a medical procedure and could have died from complications – or he could have been attacked.
mare 23:49 on 2021-04-07 Permalink
I remember the renderings and animations of the St-Laurent bike roundabout (next to the CN rail underpass) and the Bellechasse and St-Zotique bike path. The plans look beautiful, but the reality never gets even near the artist impressions.
(The St-Laurent underpass reconstruction was interrupted for a year because the contractor went bankrupt, and then was finished very differently. The Bellechasse bike path was made and then immediately uprooted because water and electricity conduits are built on the south side. They just started again on that. The St-Zotique bike path construction was announced on signs and a few months after the date had passed the signs were removed and the street is still exactly the same as it was two years ago.)
Joey 09:02 on 2021-04-08 Permalink
From the pics Alex Norris posted on Facebook, I was wondering if the plan was to make it one-way. Looks like it isn’t, but it seems they are eliminating the parking lane. Bold move to have a major street like Pine have nowhere for cars/trucks to pull over…
John B 09:39 on 2021-04-08 Permalink
I don’t know, I bike down Pine sometimes and I don’t think there’s a ton of business there – at least it seems like a bit of an abandoned wasteland. I bet most of the car traffic is using it as a connection to Cote-des-Neiges. There’s probably a study somewhere.
This renovation will bring pedestrian & bike traffic to the few businesses that are there, and maybe provide enough that more businesses can open up.
Joey 09:54 on 2021-04-08 Permalink
@John B agreed that the vision here (like the REV on St Denis) seems to be in part to reduce the attractiveness of the street as a thoroughfare. We’ll see if the plans ever see the light of day… guess it’ll depend on the election.
DeWolf 10:32 on 2021-04-08 Permalink
Joey, Pine hasn’t had any parking for two years.
DeWolf 10:37 on 2021-04-08 Permalink
Mare, installation of the St-Zotique bike path was delayed to this year, officially because the electrical work on Beaubien was still underway and the borough didn’t want to do any work on St-Zotique when there wasn’t a detour route available. Unofficially, the bikelash last summer may have given the borough cold feet. Supposedly the work on St-Zotique will resume sometime soon but the borough has been evasive about the details.
DeWolf 10:42 on 2021-04-08 Permalink
Also in response to Joey – Pine isn’t losing any traffic capacity. East of Park, It has always had two lanes of moving traffic and will continue to have two lanes of traffic after the revamp.
I just checked and the parking was eliminated in 2018. That means the street has been in its “new” configuration with two lanes of traffic and curbside bike lanes for nearly three years already. The renovations will simply make the configuration permanent. Any problems with congestion etc. would have arisen by now.
Meezly 11:29 on 2021-04-08 Permalink
Pine is ugly, so I welcome any improvement. This past spring, I had to walk from Ave du Parc towards St-Denis a few times. I’d get off the bus at the Hotel Dieu stop before Pins, and walk along the side streets simply because it’s a much more pleasant walk though walking along Pins would have been more direct. Having biked and walked along Pins, I hope they’ll add a few pedestrian crossings, as it can be very difficult to cross Pins at a side street corner during busy times unless you’re at an intersection.
mare 12:18 on 2021-04-08 Permalink
@DeWolf Thanks for the update. Making Bellechasse one way isn’t very popular with drivers, especially because there are restrictions on turning across the median on both Rosemont and Beaubien during rush hour. I guess adding another one-way East-West street will make this even more pronounced. Rosemont and Beaubien definitely have become much busier, especially in the afternoon, now cars have one less route to drive East coming from Van Horne, St-Denis and St-Laurent on their way to the St-Michel entrance of the 40 E. The average speed has also gone up, despite large sections being 30km/h.
Ephraim 14:05 on 2021-04-08 Permalink
Better set of pictures at https://imgur.com/a/EoSx4Gt and apparently no one told them that Laloux has been gone for YEARS. And why do some of the pictures look like Rachel? I hope someone remembers that there is a readaptation centre (Villa Medica) in the neighbourhood and that accessibility to those with wheelchairs, canes and walkers is a consideration. (One of the reasons that the neighbourhood needs more public seating, they need to rest.)