Montreal City Weblog

Kate 10:20 on 2023-01-06 Permalink Reply  

• Ephraim 12:30 on 2023-01-06 Permalink

  The point they are trying to make is that the city is telling everyone… use public transit and yet, in the boroughs where they have the most public transit, not only aren’t they using public transit, they have increased the number of cars that they are using. (While boroughs that don’t seem to be using less cars) And yet the data is not presented per capita or per citizen/km2, which might be more relevant

  The question I have is methodology. For example, why are there more cars and what are they used for. For example, you can’t replace a car with public transit when it comes to patrolling for parking tickets. And you can’t replace a car with public transit when goods have to be moved from one location to another. So how many cars are patrolling illegal parking out in RDP versus the Plateau and Ville-Marie. And in Ville-Marie, you have lower numbers of people living there as the numbers don’t really represent those who work downtown and/or those in hotel rooms where are occupied high percentages of the year.

  Which leads to even more questions… for example, when you have a supervisor who has to go to a location, would it be cheaper in the long run to actually use public transit (even if that public transit is a taxi/uber) and of course, my personal bugaboo… the cost of the parking spot for that car, which could be used by citizens and earn money by having a parking meter…. yes, that should be calculated into the costs of running the car, not just fuel and maintenance.

• DeWolf 12:37 on 2023-01-06 Permalink

  What a weird piece. It seems targeted at “war on cars” people who think that anyone who promotes public transit and alternative mobility actually wants to ban all cars and force everyone to ride bicycles, and if they ever use a car themselves they’re a hypocrite. Basically the Facebook trolls who think they’re pulling a real gotcha when they point out that Valérie Plante has an official car that takes her around to work functions.

  “Critics” in this case appears to be Peter Trent, so take that for what it’s worth. He says “every car takes up space and it causes problems for other cars and traffic,” which is absolutely true. But if we’re going to be casting stones, Trent didn’t do anything in his long political career to reduce car dependency.

  There are a lot of numbers in this article but no mention that if the city somehow managed to get rid of all 3608 of its cars, vans and pickups, there would still be 1 million private vehicles on the island of Montreal.

• DeWolf 12:43 on 2023-01-06 Permalink

  @Ephraim, the piece has a lot of holes in its data analysis. It notes that RPP and the Plateau have more cars than other boroughs, but they also have a larger population than most other boroughs. And it doesn’t explain what those cars are being used for.

  I think ultimately there’s a good case to be made that the city should be making more of an effort to eliminate all unnecessary car use among its own employees. Parking enforcement is a good example because I’m always surprised to see the inspectors driving around places like the Plateau when it would be much more efficient for them to walk. (I have seen parking inspectors on bikes, but rarely.) I’d like to know why that is, whether anyone has proposed getting parking inspectors out of their cars, and if they have, whether there was any pushback from employees or their union. But the piece doesn’t go into any details like that.

  The broader point about the city being hypocritical is nonsense. Cars are useful. They are sometimes necessary. But trying to build a city that isn’t completely monopolized by cars does not require someone to turn into some kind of transport vegan who eschews automotive transport at all costs.

• Blork 12:53 on 2023-01-06 Permalink

  Yeah, that piece doesn’t seem to know what its trying to say. The only noteworthy bit I found is that the small cars in Rosemount average something like 4400 km a year, which is very little. It seems like that’s a place where they have more cars than they need, although the article doesn’t get into usage patterns. For example, are those cars rarely used, but when they are used they’re all used at the same time?

  If not, then they could easily have fewer of them, and if there’s no car available when a supervisor has to go check on a site then they can take a goddamn Uber!

  Otherwise, it reads the way DeWolf describes, like FB trolls yelling at clouds. It’s like criticizing the police for wanting fewer guns on the street. “But YOU have a gun. Hypocrite!” FFS!

• bumper carz 14:28 on 2023-01-06 Permalink

  One side-effect of municipal car-generosity… Two years ago, I watched in horror as a water-truck (camion cisterne) parked on a new bike path in Vaudreuil in order to water a small tree. There was lots of room in the parking lot next to it. The bike path was ruined by the weight of the vehicle, and was patched last summer. It took less then two minutes to destroy the bike path with a heavy truck.

  This is not an isolated case. By making large trucks available to staff for things that don’t require it, cities are destroying a lot of their own infrastruture. Young guys in city-logo pickups “don’t know=don’t care” that bike paths and walkways weren’t designed to withstand these giant machines.

• jeather 17:09 on 2023-01-06 Permalink

  I also had no idea a bike path would not be able to hold a truck, I assumed it could do whatever the street next to it could, as it generally used to be part of that street.

• bumper carz 23:04 on 2023-01-06 Permalink

  jeather, if the bike lane is simply part of a city street, it can definitely hold a car or truck. But bike paths that go through forests, on lawns, through parks, etc. usually don’t have the same structure because they aren’t supposed to be carrying thousands of kgs.