This had better work.
Updates from April, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Second Twitter test
DisgruntledGoat
Roger roger
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Kate
Temporary test to check Twitter link
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Kate
A demo was held Sunday to call attention to the housing crisis.
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Kate
Emmanuel Macron is projected to win the French election – always nice to exclude a fascist from power – and I’d be curious to know whether there’s any way to find out which way Montreal’s French residents voted.
vasi
So far no official 2nd round results from the “hors de France” constituency, but you can see that it was very pro-Macron in the first round: https://www.resultats-elections.interieur.gouv.fr/presidentielle-2022/000/099/index.html
Last time around in 2017, it was 91% to 9% for Macron: https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/presidentielle_2017_-_2nd_tour_-_resultats_par_circonscription_consulaire_2_cle0285e5.pdf
Kate
Thank you, vasi. I have French neighbours and it seems reasonably safe to congratulate them if I see them.
dhomas
Kate
Thanks, dhomas. I understand that to many French voters Macron was the lesser of two evils, but at least they made the right choice under the circumstances.
David
Good to see Le Pen denied the Presidency, but it’s troubling nonetheless that she won a clear majority of voters youger than 50 years old.
dhomas
I work primarily with French folks, in France. One of them was so disappointed in this weekend’s results that he said he was going to stop voting because it’s all rigged. Despite not agreeing with his preferred candidate, I tried to convince him that voting is a risk free gamble: it costs nothing and either your vote doesn’t count (you lose, having wagered nothing) or it does (you win). He wouldn’t have any of it. One less far right voter, I suppose.
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Kate
A national funeral is to be held for Guy Lafleur, May 3 at Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, as tweeted by François Legault. Lafleur will lie in state for two days before this at the Bell Centre (where he never played).
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Kate
The city has finally put out a tender for the dismantling of the Craig pumping station, that distinctive but now decrepit structure that still stands under the Jacques‑Cartier bridge. A photo in this piece shows that the building was not always isolated on a small traffic island.
dhomas
Do these dismantling and reassembling projects ever get done? Or do they say they will put it back together and wait for people to forget? I seem to remember another such project in the past few years.
CE
If the result ends up being anything like what was done on the lower Main, I’d rather they just throw the whole building into the Saint Lawrence and forget that it ever existed.
DeWolf
@dhomas, you’re probably thinking of the old De Lorimier town hall/fire station on Mont-Royal. It’s finally being rebuilt after many years of delays.
Kate
DeWolf, you mean the one that caught fire when the guys went out on a call and left a pot of hot oil on the station stove?
dhomas, they sometimes get façaded, as CE notes above. But this little building is one of a kind, and there’s no space there to add anything to it. I remember plans to make it into a gallery or something like that, years ago, which came to nothing. But there are some nice details carved into the stone walls that ought to be saved if they can.
Richard
It’s not exactly one of a a kind. The Riverside Pumping Station from 1887 is still going strong thanks to a hardcore group of dedicated metalworker artisans. Their building might be a bit less imposing, but it’s way better maintained.
https://lesforgesdemontreal.org
There’s a Facebook group for folks who care about the Craig Pumping Station. Probably your best resource for keeping up with developments.
Kate
Riverside’s still in use, though, as you point out, and isn’t a carbon copy of the Craig building. But thank you for the links.
Margaret
I have suggested in the past that a multi-museum linking Musee des Patriotes and something to do with Montreal’s brewing history at the Molson complex could be joined with an underground tunnel via the Craig Station, where visitors could pop up like prairie dogs midway and get a museal taste of Montreal’s sewage & pumping station history. A diagonal, 3 theme museum with a single admission fee.
Margaret
***La-Prison-des-Patriotes-au-Pied-du-Courant
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Kate
Radio-Canada’s history bit Sunday is the story of Broue, which started in a small theatre on the Main in 1979 – there’s a plaque on the building, somewhere between Laurier and Fairmount – and became a Quebec classic, revived in 2019 with a new cast. French Wikipedia observes that the setting is a tavern on the eve of the first day women were admitted, “cette tradition qui se perd avec la montée du féminisme.”
Update: I thought maybe someone would’ve photographed the plaque, and here it is.
The BAnQ put up a nice selection of vintage postcards of Montreal parks. But all the other usual sources of historical stuff this weekend are swamped by memoirs of Guy Lafleur.
Oh, and here’s a recent piece in Est Media about the cinemas of Rosemont-La-Petite-Patrie of which only the Cinéma Beaubien still exists and shows movies.
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Kate
The city is considering a hike in the pothole repair budget. The Journal says repair garages are overwhelmed with cars busted up with pothole damage.
We have good engineering schools in this town. The city should create a prestigious prize for the development of a better asphalt formulation so that roads don’t degrade so quickly.
steph
2013 – “Montrealers are fed up with the expensive and poor-quality work of suspect asphalt companies, the opposition Vision Montreal party says it’s time the city considered producing its own asphalt to repair potholes and repave streets.”
nothing came to futition. Applebaum was our mayor, everything was squeaky clean.The poor asphalt formula is by design. Do the engineering school teach engineered obsolecense?
Kevin
Change the contracts so that the company that builds the road is responsible for 30 years of maintenance.
carswell
Echoing steph here. I can’t vouch for this personally but persons who work with technical services in nearby municipalities have told me that many of Montreal’s and, to a lesser or greater extent, Quebec’s road problems stem from corruption. A cited example was the gravel used for road beds. The construction firm will, if necessary (it isn’t always due to inspector overwork, absenteeism or incompetence), pay off the inspector and then use a lesser (read cheaper) grade of gravel and/or put down an 8.5 cm layer instead of the specified 10 cm (figures pulled from thin air) and/or improperly compact the bed before paving. This leads to premature wear, exacerbated by our freeze-thaw climate and scraping by plows, which the firms view as a good thing since it means more contracts.
It may not be simply greed, either. The low profit margins resulting from the tendering process, which typically awards the contract to the lowest “qualified” bidder, encourage contractors, especially ones facing cost overruns, to cut corners.
DeWolf
Many streets and roads need to be completely rebuilt. You can patch things up with as much high-quality asphalt as you want but if the foundational layers are broken, the road will continue to deteriorate until you start from scratch and rebuild the whole thing.
As for Kevin’s idea, how does it work when a third party inevitably needs to excavate the road for some reason or another? Hydro-Québec, Énergir, the CSEM, various city departments, private contractors. They break the road, dig a big hole and are responsible for patching it up again. The quality varies, but anyone can easily point the finger at someone else if the repairs don’t last.
There needs to be vastly better coordination in road repairs and better quality construction materials, but also an emphasis on reducing the amount of traffic on the roads – which means investing even more in public transit and alternative mobility.
Snow clearance practices probably also need to be reviewed because scraping ice and snow right down to the asphalt is a good way to damage the road. Some streets have granite curbs and even they are chipped and broken from years of abuse by snowplows and ice scrapers.
mare
What DeWolf said, and on top of that all pothole repairs are mechanically unsound. They just push a piece of asphalt in a hole, without removing weak and loose material around the periferie of the pothole. And they also never undercut the edges. If they would do that, there would be a mechanical bond, on top of the relatively weak chemical bond (new asphalt sticking to old asphalt or concrete).
Almost every patch they put in now will have fallen out by next year, with some additional surrounding material, either by normal traffic or pulled out by snow scrapers. Augmented by water infiltration and frost expansion it’s a never ending process of creating bigger and bigger potholes.Ephraim
I think only Cote-St-Luc has proper pothole machinery. They actually clear it and then repave the street. It’s not simply a little patch… they get rid of the cracks and all, so it doesn’t come back.
In parts of the UK, they often include in the contract for paving a road a warranty on the road for years, so they have to repair it, if it develops potholes. And they charge them, per hour for when the road is closed. So they repair it quickly and often, if possible, at night.
Kevin
Notify all players that a road is being rebuilt and if they have to dig into it afterward, they will have to pay to repave the entire block, because a patch doesn’t work.
I know this was attempted with the St. Laurent or St. Denis dig, but there was a lack of willpower on the part of city officials to enforce this.
In addition, Quebec needs to make road and materials specifications based on neighbouring jurisdictions with similar climates and not whatever is done in France and Belgium and the Francophonie. This means engineers need to be able to communicate in English (horrors) in order to understand that Quebec’s specifications are decades out of date.
Thirdly, damage during thaw is proportional to weight of vehicle, so ban heavy vehicles from weak streets at certain times of year. The province also has to man weighing stations for big rigs.
dhomas
If we impose a guarantee of any kind, those companies will say they provide a guarantee and then “go out of business” when asked to provide warranty services. The roof on my house was guaranteed for 20 years. It started leaking within 4-5 years, but the company had gone out of business (though I see the people responsible for it are working for a differently named outfit now).
Kevin
Only firms with 20 years history allowed to apply even if (clutch pearls) they are from out of province. Half of payment will be held in escrow and given out as an annuity over life of street.
Sorry about your roof @dhomas. My was done last week and choosing the firm was an ordeal–and I did not go with lowest bidder.
Ephraim
@dhomas – I’m sure that you can include a bonded guarantee. Whereupon they pay someone via Lloyd’s to guarantee it (likely by ensuring personal guarantees and a hefty sum). Therefore essentially the city is buying an insurance policy, but allowing Lloyd’s to essentially verify and indemnify based on criteria that keeps the city out of the calculations and insures that it will be effective.
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Kate
A man got stabbed in a garage overnight in a garage in the Mile End. He’s not badly hurt. And that’s the only violence on the police blotter Sunday morning.
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Kate
Two studies being made here are looking into psychedelic microdosing as a treatment for mental difficulties.
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Kate
There’s a very rainy week in store, with no sun expected till after the end of the month.
JaneyB 18:24 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
I can see ‘This had better work’.
Kate 18:27 on 2022-04-24 Permalink
Good. But it may be deleted by now.