Summit on construction sites
The city will be holding a summit on construction sites next month, but CTV summons up Alan DeSousa to kvetch that it’s too late. Too late for what? The city will always be at grips with road repairs and construction sites. It’s never too late to act to get a handle on them. What does DeSousa want? For the city administration to shrug and give up because it’s “too late”?
The item quotes longtime traffic analyst Rick Leckner: “The real trouble is the independence of the boroughs who do what they want when they want.”
In recent days, two participants have made similar observations.
dhomas: “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.”
mare on an underpass bike path: “…the lowest point, where the potholes spring up, is exactly on the border between two boroughs. So the patches are of bad quality and fail very soon after being fixed. […] 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.”
Arguably, the borough system is a kludge that should never have happened, although what are the odds of fixing it now? But the city should exert its power to dominate over the kind of nonsense described here.
shawn 09:32 on 2023-02-21 Permalink
I have a tendency to blame the authorities for the state of our roads but today’s article points out that it’s also a question of freeze/thaw cycles and how many we have https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/freeze-thaw-montreal-infrastructure-1.6754337
DeWolf 12:07 on 2023-02-21 Permalink
We’ve had this discussion about boroughs here before and I think it’s easy to blame them for whatever without recognizing the benefits of having more local representation.
After its municipal mergers, Toronto went down the opposite path of Montreal: big, centralized municipal government with a relatively small city council. And if you talk to people living in the urban parts of Toronto, they’ll tell you the city has been in steady decline for years in terms of municipal services and the ability to make any sort of positive change for its residents. Parks are falling apart, roads are falling apart, municipal services are underfunded, and it takes a massive multi-year fight to get things like the Bloor bike path or King Street transit corridor implemented because city council and the municipal administration is dominated by suburbanites who want to keep property taxes low at all costs.
We like to complain a lot here but I think that, on the whole, Montreal is doing a lot better than it was 20 years ago. The parks are nicer, there are more (and better) libraries, there have been public space improvements like all the curb extensions or transformation of Laurier Street around the metro. And a lot of those changes have been led by the boroughs.
Orr 14:06 on 2023-02-21 Permalink
Making all the Plateau pedestrian safety/quality of life/livable streets has been a big improvement. But this means pushing more traffic to artery roads. Boul St-Joseph ouest is now the primary east-west car artery on the Plateau and at the west end it ends with two blocks in Outremont and clearly Outremont doesn’t give a hoot about inter-borough cooperation. Snow cleaning, pedestrian safety, controlling excessive speeding, just pretends it’s a leafy suburb and maintains a blithe “artery, what artery” attitude. Surprising as it has a Denis-Coderre-party mayor and cars-cars-cars was their motto.
Ian 10:18 on 2023-02-22 Permalink
What are you even talking about? Saint Joe is Plateau from Iberville to Hutchison and it’s Outremont’s fault somehow?
St Joe east of Hutchison was redone to slow traffic at the same time as the big barricades were put up at Hutchison. Outremont was under PM control at the time (a political groundswell that they squandered by being perceived as authoritarian) and the de l’Epée “shortcut” from Côte saint Kitty to Laurier got blocked off to calm traffic. The current municipal government has not removed any of the traffic slowing measures. Most of Fairmount and Saint Viateur on the Outremont side are 30 km/h with a stop sign at nearly every corner. Further north, Lajoie is 20km – slower than the east-west streets in Mile End.
Blaming the Plateau’s Saint Joe problems on Outremont sounds like pretty typical buck-passing, brought to the natural reductio ad absurdum conclusion.