Police are seeking a driver who drove down the REV on St‑Denis Lajeunesse on Sunday. (Video was posted to Reddit, reported by TVA, then the TVA article was posted back to Reddit.)
(mare was right, it is Lajeunesse.)
Updates from February, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Jeanne Corriveau has an interesting piece on Le Devoir about our many abandoned buildings and what can be done to either save them and put them back into use, or demolish and rebuild. Some of them are considered patrimoine but not all. Nice point by Dinu Bumbaru about how some buildings, not considered architectural gems, can be valued as familiar features in a neighbourhood.
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Kate
La Presse looks into people living far from the river, but whose homes are often flooded during heavy rains because the sewer system can’t cope.
thomas
Living close to the river is no protection from flooding either. The Square Cartier condos cited are 600m from the Saint-Lawrence River.
Kate
Was I too oblique? If you live close to the river you might expect flooding, but if you live at a distance you might reasonably expect to be immune to it. But, not so, apparently.
Bert
Sewer flooding can come from improper sewage installations, basically the slope not being adequate or even going uphill at times. I remember a La Facture report way back that high lighted some houses in Laval IIRC that had systematic sewage flooding during heavy rains. Basically the understreet sewage drains had a sort of shallow V shape and it would just simply back up, from both ends. Still not fun and would not want to have to deal with the impacts
Spi
Frankly in the Montreal context flooding from improper infrastructure occurs far more often than from the river overflowing its banks. Isn’t there a street in Verdun that systematically floods if there’s ever more than 20mm of rain?
I don’t ask myself every spring whether or not there’s going to be flooding due to the melting snow, I do ask myself every time there’s heavy rain forecasted if the Acadie circle will be flooded again.
dhomas
Whenever there is a thaw in the winter close to my house, there is a risk of flooding, but for a very stupid reason. I live on the border of 2 boroughs. There is a barrier blocking my street from one borough to the next. The snow removal people from one borough just push the snow all the way up to the barrier, therefore blocking the sewer drain. All the water from the thaw accumulates in front of my driveway, which slopes down towards my garage. Since there is also a bus stop at the corner of my house, everytime the bus passes it splashes great amounts of water down my driveway. Since the drain at the bottom of my driveway is often iced over (it’s in the shade, so doesn’t thaw at the same rate), the water will often get into my garage. This happened to me twice in two years a few years ago. I’ve since learned that I need to make a pathway from my driveway to the sewer drain, which I now do whenever there’s an accumulation of water at my driveway. It’s saved me and my neighbour some water damage over the years.
My kids think it’s kind of fun to make rivers (I think it’s kind of annoying). The closest body of water to my house is about 3km away.
Sometimes the problems are manmade and can be avoided. I’ve reported the problem to the city, but they close my tickets systematically now (without taking any action).Kate
dhomas – you’ve probably thought of this – but have you looked up who the councillor is from the other borough, and asked them to please have their snow removal people stop doing this? Copy your own councillor when you do this. Ideally, your own councillor should not be happy that the other borough is doing something that causes damage within his or her own territory. Set them against each other!
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Kate
The Journal answers the age-old question: why is it so hot in the metro?
carswell
Since the metro is powered by electricity, wouldn’t regenerative braking generate less heat and save energy? Possibly incompatible with the current electrical system however.
mare
Without any research I’d think the rubber wheels on steel track system generate more heat than conventional steel wheels. I’ve no idea if that’s a substantial amount compared to the heat the motors and transformers produce, the heat produced by underground rock and the heat all those humans emit (75 to 120 Watt per day when in rest, more when they try to catch a metro.) Installing air conditioning in the metro cars will make the platforms and staircases warmer and you’ll end up with being too warm or too cold.
Related: I don’t get how people aren’t sweating like mad when they enter the metro in the winter and don’t take their coats off. I’m dressed for -10°C, so I **have** to take off my warm gloves, hat and coat to survive and not get a heat stroke. Only a few people do that, most stay fully dressed. They must be either very cold outside, or not sweat. What is their secret?
EmilyG
I keep my coat on in the metro in the winter. I don’t even unzip it.
I think the reason is that I don’t want my coat to be touching anyone else, because I don’t like being touched by someone’s unzipped piece of coat. But maybe that’s just my own peculiarity.Meezly
Similar to mare, my internal body temp heats up easily and the kind of person who’s prone to heatstroke. I always need to take off my hat and scarf, but will leave a glove on as I try not to touch poles, buttons, etc with my bare hands. And this was before the pandemic!
I’ve long ago stopped wondering why most people deal with heat better than I do, but it’s nice to know there are others who get hot easily!
JP
I almost always unzip my jacket and unhat on the metro. Same with getting in a car. I can’t stand having my jacket zipped if it’s not necessary.
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Kate
Another day, another firebombing in St-Laurent, where there have been four such incidents within a week, and two on the same street this month.
Blork 00:33 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
License plate is clearly visible, so it shouldn’t be hard to find them.
JP 01:00 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
Seems like maybe they ended up there by accident and had to drive down to eventually get off it. They weren’t driving that fast.
I’ve witnessed far worse…
Ephraim 08:50 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
Gee, makes you wonder about the police. They have make and model of the car and if they couldn’t read the licence plate… they need eye exams
Meezly 10:05 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
Even in that short video, the driver had plenty of opportunities to get off the REV, he certainly was in no hurry to correct his “mistake”.
Blork 10:33 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
On CBC this morning they’re saying it was probably a mistake as opposed to an intentional act. So I looked it up, and I’m guessing this is where it started (Lajeunesse and Villeray):
https://goo.gl/maps/EcTkPrnsbUooiD8YA
The REV seems pretty clearly marked in Streetview from May 2022, but in winter, with slush all over and not many bikes around I suppose it’s possible to turn too sharply and to set off in the right lane, which in fact is the REV.
Bear in mind: People make mistakes. It might look very clear to you or me when looking at a sunny day photo in Streetview when we already know the REV is there, but for someone who might not be from the area, who does not even know the REV exists, in winter, with slush all over, shit happens.
Also: remember that we often only see what we expect to see. If the driver doesn’t know about the REV and has never seen a bike lane like that, they might interpret it in their brain as just a weird street configuration.
Also: This is Quebec, which is notorious (at least to me) for terrible road signage and indicators.
Also: many people are very stupid.
As to why the driver didn’t make an effort to correct the mistake, I’m guessing they didn’t even know they had made a mistake. The driver was probably thinking “WTF crazy people put the parking lane on the left on this street! What a bunch of idiots!”
Finally, if you think only exceptionally stupid people make mistakes like that, go to Youtube and search on “selective attention test” and you’ll find out just how fickle and unreliable our (and your) “attention” is.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWSxSQsspiQ
Kate 12:20 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
So basically, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Blork 12:32 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
Yes. (Although I hesitate to say “never.”)
bumper carz 12:34 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
It’s much more popular to park cars on bike lanes than to drive a car on them.
In both cases, cars destroy all other modes the way *rock* destroys *scissors*
mare 12:53 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
I happen to cycle on that stretch of Lajeunesse very often and even in the summer that corner of La Jeunesse with Castelnau is very weird and confusing. There are some small kerbs but bicycles need to turn left against traffic and a few of the blue pylons have been broken off by, I presume, snow ploughs that also got confused.
When you drive there, maybe also coming from another intersection it is very easy to take the right lane, especially in winter because it doesn’t look much different than the situation when there’s a snow cleaning operation in progress with two lanes separated with a hill of snow. Easy to take the wrong lane when you turn from a side street. The driver is ignoring the very clear bicycle stencils on the road though, and that might be the reason to get a ticket. The blue line along the bike path is less clear as an indicator because those are on many other streets as they’re use as indicators of the marathon route (they should use a different colour).
So yeah, I give them some slack. Had the street be full of cars waiting for traffic lights my opinion would be different.
These things happen, drivers even regularly manage to enter highways going in the wrong direction. I’ve done something similar years ago when I drove in my car and reached a fork in the road were a wide bike path started at the right. I always cycle there, it was very close to my house so I wasn’t yet in ‘bike mode’ so I took the right ‘lane’ as I usually do. Realized it pretty quickly but couldn’t get off it because there were pretty high kerbs separating the bike path from the driving lane. Only at a traffic light a few hundred metres later could I swerve left. Didn’t get a ticket and encountered only one irritated cyclist. Sorry!
Kate 13:52 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
mare, I was sure that was St-Denis in the video. the REV is on the east side on Lajeunesse.
DeWolf 14:14 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
I’m less upset about this than I am about people who park their cars in the bike paths, somehow ignoring all the signage, road markings and the fact that everyone else is parking away from the curb.
There should be a planted median along the REV like on Rachel and Clark, but I suppose it’s a question of time and budget. Of course, even that doesn’t prevent clueless drivers from driving in the path. I’ve seen cars drive up the Rachel bike path even though it’s very obviously not a car lane.
Ideally, Montreal would pave its bike paths with coloured asphalt like they do in the Netherlands, which makes it very obvious which spaces are for bikes and which are for cars. But somehow our paving companies are incapable of doing this, as you can see with the barely visible red asphalt on the Sauvé and Pie-IX bus lanes.
mare 14:27 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
@Kate One way street: not St-Denis. Lajeunesse is one-way and car traffic heads north. The REV does too, and is indeed on the east side.
St-Denis become one way north of the 40, but then the south track of the REV is on Berri, not St-Denis.
It’s not a very busy section of the REV, not even in the summer, and recently some blocks were very poorly cleared of snow (Ahuntsic!).
You probably don’t come there very often. Neither did I before the REV.
Blork 14:28 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
Even if it’s an understandable mistake he should still get a ticket. Not a “PAY THIS MOTHERF*CKER!” ticket but a “Sorry about this, but it was your mistake” ticket. (Still the same ticket, but it’s the thinking behind it…)
Kate, the article says it was on Lajeunesse. Based on my extensive forensic analysis (!) I’m pretty sure the video was taken about half a block north of the intersection of Lajeunesse and Villeray, with the car heading north.
mare 14:41 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
@DeWolf I agree parked and ‘stopped’ (for some reason drivers putting on hazard lights and going into a shop don’t consider that stopping; ‘just one minute’) is way worse.
About the red asphalt, in the Netherlands they use very open asphalt which is 50% open space, very soft and drains extremely well. It won’t survive more than a few Montreal winters with mechanical snow scraping and freeze-thaw cycles.
Too colour our type of asphalt you probably have to put so much colourant in it that it changes its properties too much, and will become very expensive. I’ve see some short stretches somewhere in Montreal or the burbs, they might be testing it. The painted areas tend to become very slippery, just like zebras and the green boxes to give cyclists more visibility at traffic lights. (And the paint is scraped off every year. Crushed ice is a very effective paint stripper.)
Joey 16:02 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
@DeWolf I suppose that’s why god created saliva and door handles…
Ian 21:44 on 2023-02-14 Permalink
@mare as evidenced by modern brick, it is very easy to colour concrete. Asphalt is not as easy but then again we know concrete lasts a lot longer than asphalt so it might not be a bad idea – certainly no more expensive than planter medians!
Orr 16:26 on 2023-02-15 Permalink
Bollards, perhaps of the flexy variety, would have solved this problem. Although perhaps winter bike-path cleaning prevents their use in the winter months?
Around place-des-arts parts of the bike path are of coloured concrete (in concrete block form) and it is presently actively self-destructing after about a decade of Montreal winters.