New bike path safety in Petite-Patrie
The underpass at Christophe-Colomb and Des Carrières has always been dicey for cyclists and pedestrians, so the city is going to redo the bike path and sidewalk to make it pleasanter and safer to use.
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Kate
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Chris 23:37 on 2023-02-19 Permalink
I hope they don’t build the new bike path at street level, as opposed to sidewalk level. It’s always so annoying to lose the energy going further down then further up again.
mare 00:43 on 2023-02-20 Permalink
One of the reasons it’s so dicey is that the lowest point, where the potholes spring up, is exactly on the border between two boroughs. So it’s always a hassle to decide who has to do the maintenance, despite the fact that the voirie is almost right above it. So the patches are of really bad quality and fail very soon after being fixed. I’m glad this will be part of the Christophe-Coulomb bike path remake.
(Years ago I saw a sidewalk snowplough stop halfway the underpass and turn around, leaving a pile of snow in the middle of the sidewalk. “Not my snow.” That was before the bike paths were even plowed.)
DeWolf 11:41 on 2023-02-20 Permalink
I’m not sure how much of a change there will be to the underpass, other than converting the existing bidirectional bike path into uni-directional and adding another one on the east side of the street. It seems like most of the work will focus on redoing des Carrières, which really is awful in that particular section.
François Limoges shared some renderings on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/francois.limoges/posts/pfbid08tobciYfpVYn1eHPShhnL27iV7bTH7RjDh9GemAha7KeEir5Zwm4ciX1RG9HFi63l
What’s most disappointing to me is that we’re still operating in the old mode of designing intersections, which is to say that pedestrians and cyclists need to descend to car level in order to cross the street. This would be a perfect opportunity to install raised crosswalks but there don’t appear to be any in the renderings.
Orr 14:19 on 2023-02-21 Permalink
I am happy to have the bike & pedestrian sidewalks on each side of the road so cyclists travelling in the direction of traffic stay on their side. Do not like two-direction bike traffic on narrow sidewalks.
An interesting thing about this project is that parts of this semi-large infrastructure project are going to be prefabricated in a factory, not built on site.
A little east at the Papineau underpass water is leaking through the walls of this underpass onto the sidewalk and making very pretty but pretty dangerous ice-falls. Would think it’s going to need replacement soon too.