The river ferry between the Old Port and Pointe-aux-Trembles is back, but this year’s schedule is not so popular. The first run is at 10 a.m., making it not so useful for people on traditional office hours, and places can no longer be reserved.
Updates from July, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Mamadi Camara is suing the city for $1.2 million over his mistaken arrest last winter in an attack on a policeman in Park Extension.
Ant6n
What’s this, the US?
paul
good…take it out of the police budget
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Kate
In the Journal, Elsie Lefebvre asks which mayoral candidate you prefer. Ignoring other contenders, she gives a straightforward breakdown of Plante vs. Coderre, no bombshells or in‑depth psychological analysis here.
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Kate
A man died in a house fire in Rivière-des-Prairies on Wednesday morning. Neighbours had thought the house abandoned.
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Kate
A new site called STOPMtl.ca aims to carry out an independent record of police stops across a map of the city. It’s the fruit of a collaboration by the INRS, McGill, Concordia and University College London.
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Kate
Shots were fired early Wednesday in Côte St-Paul but nobody turned up injured.
Are we supposed to read a message in these victimless gestures, or are they just the actions of stupid young guys who want to try out their illegal firearms at night?
Motive won’t matter either way if any of these stray bullets gets into someone’s bedroom and kills them, though.
In Montreal North, fireworks are causing concern. I know what they mean: someone let off some pétards on my street the evening of the Italy win, and I wondered if I’d recognize the difference from gunfire.
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Kate
The tent on Cabot Square will be there till December 1, in the expectation something more permanent will be in place by then. Considering it was put up as a warming station after the death of cold of an indigenous man who couldn’t find shelter, taking it down at the start of December would be perverse otherwise.
My prediction? It will not come down on December 1.
ERIC
This tent should be closed, the government has prepared space for the homeless, but the homeless don’t want to go, and more gathering homeless people causes the security problem.
Daniel D 18:05 on 2021-07-15 Permalink
Coincidentally, I used this service for the first time last Saturday. It really is so fast, and coming from London where we have the Thames Clippers, it made me think about how the river here is an underused transit resource.
The company operating the Pointe-aux-Trembles ferry seems to have done a really good job with limited resources and what appears to be a shoe-string budget – passengers have to wait in a tent, and pay for tickets using a card reader connected to someone’s iPhone.
But not running this service in peak hours seems a bit bonkers.
I also noticed the same company appears to several other ferry services, including from Pointe-aux-Trembles to Repentigny, but this service goes from a completely different part of Pointe-aux-Trembles. Since the train from Repentigny to Montreal is infrequent (and doesn’t run at all at weekends) why not join up this to form a full service?
There’s so much opportunity here for rapid integrated transit, which seems to be getting missed. See the map of the aforementioned Thames Clipper to get an idea how it could be implemented: https://www.thamesclippers.com/plan-your-journey/route-map
Kate 10:37 on 2021-07-16 Permalink
Thank you, Daniel D! It’s always valuable to see comparative info from other cities.
One of the reasons we don’t have an extensive ferry system must be winter. But that doesn’t rule out the possibilities of boat transport for half to 2/3 of the year.
Blork 10:46 on 2021-07-16 Permalink
Winter is a big factor for sure. But there’s also the fact that downtown is so far from the river (about a kilometre and a half). Compare that with London, Paris, Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Tokyo, Sydney, (etc. etc.) where the rivers are smaller, less volatile, and cut right through the business districts with dense city-center on both banks. Montreal is nothing like those places.
Daniel D 13:43 on 2021-07-16 Permalink
Kate: You could be right. Perhaps it’s also not profitable to run a large integrated service which can only run for part of the year, with indeterminate starts and ends of seasons. That said, my personal view is a river service could fall under the STM’s mandate in the same way Transport for London (TfL) manage The Thames Clipper and have integrated it into their brand identity with a dedicated roundel (see the bottom of this page: https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/stories/design/evolution-roundel).
Blork: It is hard to fairly compare the Thames to the Saint Lawrence for the reasons you stated; The Thames goes through the heart of London, whereas the Saint Lawrence skims the southern short of Montreal. However, this is where the “integrated” part of building a transit network comes in. Why not turn the ferry piers into transit hubs? If we’re building an REM or streetcar in the East, why not make this all part of one project and connect things up properly, giving more than one method of getting from A to B?
(Disclaimer: I am of course well aware the REM is anti-competitive and doesn’t want integrated transit, as if people have other choices in their territory it will affect their profit margin)