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  • Kate 18:32 on 2021-08-23 Permalink | Reply  

    Police have been reaching for the tear gas a lot lately.

    In tangential commentary, Ted Rutland writes in La Presse about the futility of returning to a gang crackdown which, in the past, has always mainly meant stopping and searching a lot of young Black men. The last time this was done, 40% of the young Black men in Montreal North and St-Michel were stopped and questioned by police, who eventually created an unwieldy database of 10,000 names of suspected gang members. It’s a nifty way to make a whole generation of guys know they’re excluded from society, but it doesn’t fix the problem, q.e.d.

     

    • Kate 18:16 on 2021-08-23 Permalink | Reply  

      The city is going to have an Office of Gastronomy. It’s a Tourisme Montreal deal, which I suspect will do nothing more than provide a couple of nice jobs for somebody’s friends, but I hope it gives a bit of help to hardworking resto folks, if only to keep up appearances.

       

      • Ephraim 18:30 on 2021-08-23 Permalink

        Can’t we just buy a lottery ticket instead. Anything related to Tourisme Montreal is a giant waste of money. They aren’t the government, but they collect a tax. They aren’t representing the tourism industry as only about 1/4 of the tourist businesses are members…. they charge extra! They aren’t even in touch with the industry. They are a fiasco.

      • Kate 18:37 on 2021-08-23 Permalink

        Ephraim, I knew you’d bite on this one.

        Valérie Plante isn’t a fool, but she plays nice with Tourisme Montreal. In this case, is she just doing it to make it look like she’s giving the nod to something useful, while knowing it’s just meaningless window dressing?

        Is there anyone who can sit down with her and explain why T.M. is not helping, and some other arrangement needs to replace it? Would the city even have the power to disenfranchise T.M., and create something new that actually works for the tourism-oriented businesses here?

      • Ephraim 21:32 on 2021-08-23 Permalink

        The city should in fact make it’s own organization and claim the 3.5% tax from the government. Montreal should be in charge of it’s own tourism and in making it vibrant. Tourisme Montreal still pushes Montreal as Paris in North America. As long as they set it up as a not-for-profit that spends all that money on helping tourists have the BEST time here… they will take it home and bring us new tourists.

      • JaneyB 23:57 on 2021-08-23 Permalink

        I think a Night Mayor might be more of a tourism draw. That feels more Montreal to me. Very overdue.

      • Ephraim 18:36 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

        Night mayor sounds interesting.
        I can’t wait to see if membership in Tourisme Montreal taints anything that the “Office of Gastronomy” does. It’s like the Maclean’s list… they snubbed Au Pied du Cochon and basically a lot of restaurants asked to be removed from the list and the list… died.

    • Kate 18:11 on 2021-08-23 Permalink | Reply  

      The city’s state of emergency, which had been renewed regularly for 17 months, will be ending this Friday, it was announced on Monday.

       

      • Kate 11:22 on 2021-08-23 Permalink | Reply  

        Réal Ménard, who’s been in politics here at both the municipal and federal levels, but hasn’t held a position since 2017, is running with Ensemble to become a councillor in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.

         

        • Kate 08:51 on 2021-08-23 Permalink | Reply  

          The heat wave is expected to continue through the week, we may be on track for the hottest August ever, and the heat is accelerating the harvest for farms nearby.

           

          • Kate 08:31 on 2021-08-23 Permalink | Reply  

            La Presse went to Vancouver, where a decision was made not to run an elevated train through its downtown, in contrast to our REM.

             

            • Daniel D 11:09 on 2021-08-23 Permalink

              I don’t know what it will take to push back on this.

              The fact they seem to be going out of the way to make sure their analysis isn’t being made public likely means they think this extreme lack of transparency is less of a controversy than the contents itself.

              Isn’t there some kind of freedom of information act in Canada which allows access to this kind of information, since decisions are being made to massively modify public spaces as a result? Perhaps this is just playing for time, and they’ll only release this report once there’s no going back and shovels are already in the ground.

            • ant6n 18:33 on 2021-08-23 Permalink

              Vancouver’s skytrain has 2 downtown tunnels. The first was built by taking an old single track heavy rail tunnel, and double-decking it to build two small-profile tunnels on top of one another. The second was the Canada line tunnel that’s shown in the article, which was built cut-and-cover.

              The propaganda from cdpqinfra regarding the impossibility of building tunnels is a bunch of nonsense. They should talk about costs, and perhaps cost-benefit ratios. And perhaps compare to the pink line…

            • david4716 21:35 on 2021-08-23 Permalink

              Montreal knows all about cut-and-cover, which was hugely destructive to the fabric of the city for many years.

              To your example, the Vancouver cut-and-cover tunnels absolutely destroyed the businesses on that main Granville street thing, and in the other parts of town where they dug the street up.

              This is the case pretty much everywhere in North America. For instance, the obliteration of Market Street in SF is why you’ll never see cut-and-cover again anywhere in a dense part of any California city (so, not for the BART extension in San Jose, not on the Wilshire subway or any of the stuff downtown). The NYC experience of the 1970s cut-and-cover destruction is why the new subway on the east side and the new connector is all being tunneled.

              Basically, cut-and-cover where it’s been done is very very unpopular. The current sections underway for the station box buildouts is already as much as people way.

              And beyond the cost savings that can be thrown directly back into the system, this idea that the elevated is somehow inferior is just wrong – they’re just more enjoyable trains to ride, when you can see the outside, and safer stations that have more eyes on them.

              Basically, people don’t like the elevated because they don’t want to see it for a few blocks between University and maybe Berri, and a bunch of people are trying to backfill that conservatism and hysteria with some seemingly defensible reasons for those feelings. But there just aren’t! Elevated stations saves money, builds faster, does less economic damage, and makes for a better rider experience. Build it!

            • ant6n 22:19 on 2021-08-23 Permalink

              In this century, in civilized countries, subways are built using tunnel boring machines or using cut-and-cover by building the cover first, to minimize surface disruption. This whole rant is moot.

              If one builds a rapid transit link on Rene Levesque, making it elevated, low capacity and dead-end at gare centrale is just stupid planning. We need another trunk line (which the BTW the pink line proposed) – the REM 1 already wasted the Mount Royal tunnel, let’s not double down on the short sightedness.

            • qatzelok 12:02 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

              The orange line along Viger is an example of cut and cover, as is the highway beside it. And while these cut into urban space and “disastrously” defaced the original Viger Square, imagine if both of these had been elevated instead. Another Metropolitan at the foot of Old Montreal and Downtown.

              What a disaster the CDPQ’s money-grubbing ways will create if left unchecked by popular will.

            • Thomas 12:20 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

              René-Lévesque is a wide, 8-lane North American boulevard, not particularly attractive (à mon sens, en tout cas). The median of such a comically wide street seems like an ideal spot for something like this. I feel like I must be missing something here due to all of the hand wringing, but I haven’t found it yet. I mean, it’s not like they’re building this on Sainte-Catherine or something.

            • Daisy 13:40 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

              I always thought this “comically wide street” would be a good place for a tram.

            • Kate 13:45 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

              European streets sometimes run trams down the median, but these are mostly street-level, so there isn’t a barrier of concrete pillars dividing the street. The REM ruled this out, because those trams are subject to normal traffic lights at intersections, and they couldn’t have that.

            • Daisy 14:51 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

              But a street-level tram is so much less of an eyesore…

            • Kate 17:42 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

              I totally agree.

            • Thomas 17:56 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

              Street-level trams are very pleasant (cf. Toronto), but you can’t really have an automated metro running high frequencies at-grade, with the possibility of coming into contact with pedestrians or turning cars; it would be too dangerous I think.

            • ant6n 18:07 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

              Toronto had a very 1950s tram system, where trams don’t have their own Lane and stops are often onto the street. Just Google the tram proposals that have existed for Montreal, much more modern and few problems with urban integration.

              It would be great to have trams on top of Rene Levesque, emulating the 435, and rapid transit below connecting areas further out.

            • Thomas 18:32 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

              Toronto has some old-style ‘streetcar’ trams, but some of the others are quite modern and seem to have their own lanes (perhaps Spadina if I recall correctly…?). Overall, it is a nice system that seems to work quite well.

              Back in the days of Gérald Tremblay, there was a proposal to put a tramway on Côte-des-Neiges that would have possibly run on René-Lévesque as well (honestly, I can’t really remember the details at this point). Yes, it would be nice to have some tramways on high-ridership bus routes. The BRT that’s taking a million years to (re)build on Pie-IX probably should have been a tram.

              But the rapid transit network also needs expanding, and so far no one but the CDPQ have bothered to do anything about it.

            • david477 21:26 on 2021-08-24 Permalink

              Here again, running these surface rail trams is a waste – slow, inefficient, and they don’t pull in the fare revenue to justify themselves. I mean, and I was just down in Arizona for a while, and I road both the Phoenix and Tucson light rails – which are great and efficient – and the Waymo One driverless taxi service. That Waymo, or any other similar service – Uber/Lyft/whatever – is going to totally destroy the market for slow trains like that, so it’s just a waste of money for us to invest in those. At the cost and farebox recovery, only buses could match the coming revolution.

              The smart transit money is on speed, and I think also on pleasantness of the trip – elevated is much quieter, quite a bit more enjoyable to ride, and has safer stations. Which is what the REM people are shooting for.

              Back to the cut-and-cover v. tunneling, your dig about the technology of this century is just la-la-la. Basically, you’re telling us that a reason to put it underground is because we can use these cheap cut-and-cover methods, and then scoffing at the idea of using cut-and-cover methods, then pointing to some European ideal that will never get built here. Just like with your anti-REM crusade a few years ago, where you sometimes made good points, you want some solution that’s just pie in the sky.

              Again, just trying to backfill arguments into a pre-existing reflexive anti-elevated train position isn’t a good place to situate yourself – instead, people should be talking about what the elevated stations should look like, and all the rest.

          • Kate 08:25 on 2021-08-23 Permalink | Reply  

            There was a shooting in Contrecœur Sunday evening that injured three people in a car, plus a child who was hit by a stray bullet. A suspect has been arrested after barricading himself into his house in the area.

             

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