It’s only a statistical forecast, but the populations of Montreal and Laval are expected to grow more slowly than the rest of Quebec over the next 20 years.
Updates from July, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A new passport office has opened at Fairview, giving the island of Montreal its fourth office and presumably taking pressure off the other three.
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Kate
The STM has begun installing a new kind of metro turnstile that will read bank cards.
I can’t help wondering whether this will eventually cause the phasing out of deals on ten tickets, or even passes, if every trip costs you the same, no matter how often you need to use the metro.
Jim
I was happily surprised when I was in NYC last week, where they offered tap and go on the subway turnstiles. I was only there for a couple of days with very few trips, so single fares worked fine, but it seems they are eventually having a way to combine fare payments (https://new.mta.info/fares/omny)
Bob R
This doesn’t work for everyone, obviously: but in NYC, if you have a smart phone or apple watch, you can use those for single-pay at the turnstyle. If you use it enough to pay for a full weekly pass, it then stops charging you for the remainder of the 7 days.
walkerp
In Vancouver, you can pay for the bus with your credit card, just a quick swipe. It’s really great for tourists.
Ephraim
It’s really weird what Americans can and can’t tap for… They don’t have the $100/$200 limits that we do… but sometimes even on a small tap… it puts up the signature line and you have to make them sign the receipt.
Blork
Ok, so how are they going to screw this up?
You swipe your card, but then you have to go to the STM website, register, and then confirm your purchase. The good news is that once you’re registered, next time you only need to go to the website, enter a PIN, then confirm your purchase. Although you’ll be hit with a survey every third time, and you won’t be able to confirm your purchase until you complete the survey.
Or…
You first have to download an app. Then, when you swipe your card you wait for a confirmation prompt to appear in the app. But before you can “OK” it you have to sit through two 30-second video ads.
Or… (?)
Dominic
@Blork: Also if you click in ENGLISH it brings you to a 404 page
Daniel D
How will this work with buses? A lot of Metro journeys start or end with a bus trip, so if they’re not adding these readers to buses as well, it seems like the number of people whom would benefit is quite low. Also, what about trips out into other zones, for example starting Downtown and ending somewhere in exo land? It seems this could only work if the system requires “tapping out” at the end of a journey so it can calculate the correct fare.
I remain hopeful they’ll do a good job with the implementation, but this sounds like a hack to me so they can claim they’re up there with the systems of London, Tokyo and Hong Kong.
MarcG
The project was started 7 years ago, don’t expect it to be cutting edge. I understand that it’s important to keep money in Quebec by hiring local companies to do stuff but if a product already exists, sometimes it makes sense just to buy it and install it rather than reinvent the wheel.
Uatu
I saw them installing the new turnstiles at Vendome. It took them about 10 days and workers were there at 8am and still there when I left work around 4pm all 10 days. I’m not optimistic about the system if it takes that long to install and program
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Kate
No link, just a note about how good the Île d’Orléans strawberries are this year. They have a rich complex sweetness that are testimony to a perfect growing season.
JP
I was there yesterday. It’s such a lovely place. The strawberries were amazing. We also got chocolate and did a wine tasting among other things.
Kate
The Île is such a little paradise in the river. I’ve only visited it briefly and it felt like a separate little world.
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Kate
A vacant building was torched in St‑Laurent overnight. They already have a possible suspect.
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Kate
24 Heures has an interesting look at an ordinary Rosemont plex with geothermal heating and cooling and how it was done.
mare
We looked into this for our 5-plex ten years ago, but the total quoted price of an installation was much higher than the $35,000 mentioned in the article, especially if all apartments were going to be converted. And there were only very limited subsidies for existing construction. The electricity to run the thermopump (always on) was already more than we used on electricity ourselves all year, and if we added all apartments we couldn’t legally change the rents with $50 or so per month to include heating, the increase had to be spread out gradually. So the time to recoup our investment was going to be very, very long.
On top of that, the mess was going to be huge: they would destroy the garden, and installing hot water radiators in all apartments (2 and a tiny one in the bathroom with supply hoses running through the ceilings of the apartment below) would also cause a major mess and be quite costly.
Converting the old ground floor heating system from oil to electric and upgrading the electric heaters in the apartments to more efficient ones made economically and environmentally more sense, so we did that instead. For new construction the ROI is slightly better, but it’s also rarely done. In Quebec alternative energy sources like geothermal, solar and wind have to compete with our existing ‘green’ energy infrastructure. (Whose environmental damage and massive use of construction materials makes it much less ‘green,’ but that has already happened.)But yeah, when the whole economy is going to move away from fossil fuels (which is not going to happen very fast when oil and gas still get huge subsidies from our government; so IMHO we’re already royally fucked) it will put a higher strain on the electric grid. Our hydro installations have quite some excess capacity, but that might change if the current snowfall and river runoff up north is going to diminish in the future, which is uncertain.
Kate
I wondered about the stress on the grid from “l’électrification de divers secteurs de l’économie” – maybe that means transportation, but I certainly hope it doesn’t mean more cryptocurrency farms.
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Kate
A young man was found unconscious in an outdoor city pool in Anjou overnight, and couldn’t be revived. He’s in hospital in critical condition.
There were four drownings around Quebec on the weekend.
Update: Make it five. The young man in the Anjou pool died despite CPR and hospital.
Ephraim 21:37 on 2022-07-25 Permalink
Really? There have been 50K jobs in the regions that they haven’t been able to fill in 5 years… where are these magical people that want to move to St-Louis-de-ha-ha?
Kevin 22:05 on 2022-07-25 Permalink
There is a group of people that dream of fleeing Montreal and the burbs as they get old and retire.
The ISQ projects that most regions will have a dramatic decrease of working age adults in the next 20 years. Double digit drops in many areas, including 22% in the Cote Nord.
Personally I don’t think it’s that wise to move hours away from your doctor or the closest hospital or your children when you’re at an age that you need more medical care, but at least this way we get loads of news stories about all the oh so many unintended consequences.
dhomas 13:52 on 2022-07-26 Permalink
To be honest, if I ever move away from Montreal proper, it would NOT be to “les régions”. I’ll move to somewhere it doesn’t snow. Then again, I have the luxury of European citizenship, so I have more options.
Kate 10:45 on 2022-07-27 Permalink
So envious. My UK citizenship used to give me European citizenship too, but not since Brexit.