La Presse reports that downtown was lively despite the storm on Friday, while the Journal reports on messes on the highways – the transport ministry is advising people to stay off the roads – and CBC covers power outages.
Updates from December, 2022 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Despite hiring 208 new people, the SPVM finishes the year with 27 fewer cops than a year ago, because of retirements and resignations throughout the year.
Ephraim
I want all the details… number of “resignations” because of violation of ethics and/or jail. The number of resignations related to bullying by the brotherhood, etc. And especially, the number of cops being paid for NOT doing their job as they wait for internal affairs, etc.
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Kate
La Presse tested the school zone around the corner of Rouen and Parthenais where the seven‑year‑old was killed last week. And almost nobody obeyed the signs. They caught many drivers going over 60 kmh in the 30 kmh zone.
The other school zone they looked at was in Longueuil, where everyone speeds.
qatzelok
School-aged children are one of the groups that are the most oppressed by car culture. They lost their primary socialization opportunities when cars pushed them off of public roads.
And it became much more difficult for children to get the daily outdoor activities that made childhood both educational and community-centered.
steph
The city is always looking for new sources of revenue. if the place is so bad that people are going 30km over the limit, a pair of trained police officers with a radar gun should prove profitable.
azrhey
What steph said! I live next to two school and I like to say that they could fix the goverment’s deficit in a month with a pair of radar guns on Marcel-Laurin, south of Côte-Vertu. Limit is 50, 30 with flashing lights, but no later than this morning, with ther bad weather and couple of inches slush on the ground some SUV ran down the overripe yellow at Descelles at, at least 70 or 80 in the 30 zone…
I’m all for replenishing the city coffers with all the speeding idiots and other parking idiots ( I am not anti car, my family has one and although I don’t drive, we use it regularly..I am just very very fed up to being klaxonned when trying to turn right and waiting for the green arrow to turn green because the idiot behind us can’t see the arrow is still red in front of my building..I’d also add a 250$ fine for useless use of the klaxon, double that between 8pm and 8am… and the “if you don’t want to hear klaxons/engines revving/breaks being murdered at the last second don’t live on a 6 lane thoroughfare” people… I don’t mind traffic, I mind useless noises at 3am )
Happy winter break everyone… don’t speed!Derek
I was crossing the street with my 9yo last week and I heard a mini-van driving down the street the wrong way on our one-way street. As he passed us, I gestured at the driver like “wtf” but all he did was gesture back at me mockingly. This less than a week after the 7yo was run down. People can be such jerks.
Blork
As others have said multiple times, signs are not enough. Especially new signs that signal a change without really drawing attention to the change, which is probably the case here. (See my anecdote from last week where a zone in my neighbourhood had changed from 50 to 30 with the only notice being the change on one sign from a 5 to a 3, and two years later I still didn’t know it had changed even though I walk, cycle, and drive on that block several times a week.)
Also, regarding the Longueuil part, Chemin Tiffin isn’t the best place to gauge the overall compliance. It’s a bit of an outlier as streets in that area go; it’s a long, straight run of about 2 km that’s parallel to route 134 (Tachereau) and is the only direct run down to Riverside and highway 132 in that area, so it attracts drivers who are in impatient and want to avoid Tachereau. That doesn’t make it right, but it shows that it’s not typical. Unfortunately it’s also a street with a lot of schools on it.
In my experience (limited only to anecdotal observation) drivers in Longueuil and St-Lambert (Tiffin is right on the dividing line) are Vancouver-level calm, at least when compared to drivers on the island. The difference is remarkable. Cycling around Longueuil is a dream compared to cycling on the island, and not just because the bike paths are so good. In Longueuil, when you cycle up to an intersection with a car road, the drivers are almost always calm and respectful, often doing odd things like stopping when they don’t even have a stop sign, in order to let the cyclist cross.
I should also note that my observations might be skewed a bit by being mostly observed in very residential areas, where the vast majority of drivers are very calm.
Tim S.
What everybody said. A couple of points: one of the reasons this is so difficult is it’s one of those Canadian problems where you need all three levels of government: municipalities to design the street, the province to regulate drivers (there are several thousand people in Quebec who need to have their licences revoked for life) and the federal government which regulates vehicles – it’s on them that people think it’s normal to drive F150s and Range Rovers as passenger vehicles in residential areas, and they get off scot-free.
As far as cars go, with greatest will in the world I find it hard to drive at 30km/h. I’m not a car guy, but it feels like automatic transmissions just really don’t want to drive at that speed – they’re much happier at around 50. Does anyone else find this, or am I just making excuses for myself?
Blork
Tim S, it depends on the street. For me, going 30 on narrow residential streets only feels a little bit weird, but going that slow on wider streets and boulevards does feel weird (I mean when going 30 just because you’re going 30, as opposed to because there is a lot of car traffic).
It’s like… have you ever noticed how in movies, when a couple of characters are riding bicycles side-by-side and talking to each other, they’re always riding really wobbly, like they’ve never been on a bike before? It looks weird, and it’s like that because they tend to be riding REALLY SLOWLY when filming; like just above the speed at which they would otherwise fall over. That’s what it feels like to be going 30 on a main street when you’re not otherwise slowed down by dense traffic. But I’ll say this: the older I get, the less it bothers me.
That said, it seems insane that the speed limit on small residential streets was ever 50. Looking at Rouen and Parthenais, I’d say that Rouen should be 30 regardless of school zones, and Parthenais should be 40 in general and 30 in school zones. It should be very well indicated, and more important, other, more physical measures should also be put in place (speed bumps, etc.).
Uatu
In St Lambert Riverside is a great example of traffic calming with raised crosswalks that act as speed bumps. By the time you get to Victoria you’re already slowed down for the school and the foot/ bike traffic near Riverside park. I’d wish other school and residential zones had the same setup
Spi
A fact that no one wants to acknowledge is that many of the people who are speeding in school zones are the parents of the students, as long as their kids are safe in the metal box and in the school yard everyone else be damned. This will inevitably be an unpopular opinion but if projet montreal were serious they would abolish drop off zones, hell I’d go as far as closing down the entire block around the school during drop off and pick up hours.
We all live busy lives, manage your schedule better so you’re not constantly running behind.
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Kate
The Negro Community Centre, founded in 1927, has been in abeyance for some years, but the city proposes to build a new centre in the same location as the old one, which was in a church building eventually condemned and later demolished in 2014. It will also be renamed the Centre canadien pour les Canadien.ne.s Afro‑Descendant.e.s.
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Kate
Metro spoke to Mayor Plante about the year that’s ending and about the prospects for 2023.
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Kate
CF Montreal has named a new coach, the Argentine Hernán Losada, to replace Wilfried Nancy. It’s not even mentioned here whether Losada speaks French.
SMD
He does, having spent fifteen years in Belgium.
Kate
Ah. Thank you.
Blork 11:04 on 2022-12-24 Permalink
That’s odd. I had an appointment yesterday at noon near McGill, and I was worried the driving would be treacherous, but by then it was basically just a rainy day. But more notably, there were a lot fewer cars on the road than I expected. It wasn’t exactly deserted, but if felt like a Sunday morning. Plenty of parking available on University. Afterwards I went over to the Main to pick something up, and it was also uncrowded and with plenty of parking. It felt like 1990!
Kate 18:43 on 2022-12-26 Permalink
People needn’t have driven there, Blork!
Blork 19:23 on 2022-12-26 Permalink
No, of course not. 🙂 I’m just saying that from my blinkered perspective things seemed unusually deserted. Although I didn’t actually go to Ste-C, and as I think about it there were plenty of people on foot on the Main.