The theoretical $36B REM de l’Est would not link directly downtown and would not be in service till 2036. There was an interesting comment here on the last REM post, which is worth reading.
La Presse’s Stéphanie Grammond considers the huge sum – which she estimates would reach $50B when all the bills come in – compared to other needs in Quebec.
Josée Legault drew the “we hates Montreal” straw this week with a piece entited L’été à Montréal : de moins en moins bucolique.
The Journal’s readership laps this stuff up. That, if nothing else, is an incentive for the publication to keep spewing the hate.
But I also wonder how much of it is actually directed at the city as opposed to Projet and, more specifically, Plante, who’s not only a progressive (of sorts) but also a female.
Would these stories appear so frequently if Coderre had been reelected? Were they a regular thing when he was mayor?
I dunno, there isn’t the deep-seated hate for Montreal and all things cosmopolitan in this piece – it’s more of an assortment cranky property owner complaints. She who won’t be enjoying much of her summer (we also, years ago, had to flee our home when a firefighter frantically banged on our door because some work crew had cracked open a gas pipe across the street) so we all get to hear about it. Put it another way – there’s not much in her piece that’s wrong or overstated, and she chooses not to draw conclusions about bohos or bike lanes or whatever. If you’re lucky, you live in one of the nicest cities on the planet. If you’re unlucky, you live in a construction zone. All this work is important, necessary even, and can’t wait any longer; it still doesn’t make the experience any more enjoyable.
Sure, you could fault Legault for only coming around to pointing all this out when it directly affected her life (journalism!). But if a similar piece ran under an unknown’s byline in the Rover, for instance, would we so quickly dismiss it?
But it’s so fruitless to complain about roadworks. So many previous city governments kicked the can down the road when it came to maintaining sewers and water mains. They were inevitably going to come home to roost.
(This edit prepared by the Mixed Metaphor Society.)
That’s a horse of a different colour 😀
While there was a LONG time infrastructure was neglected BUT Plante has been mayor since 2017 and the Plateau has been controlled by PM considerably longer, since 2009 – how long are we going to keep blaming former governments for today’s mismanagement?
There has been a traffic cone in a sinkhole at the corner fo Hutchison and Van Horne for over 2 months now. The block of Fairmount between Park and Jeanne-Mance gets dug up about every 2 years. Construction zones still have no cetnral coordination. Is that Coderre’s fault, too?
Maybe infrastructure is a problem we can solve with clowns.
Ian, we’re talking like a century of neglect, not just one or two terms at city hall.
I’ve expanded on this in the past, but I’ve always had a feeling here that the Quiet Revolution was so big, and the things that were built as a result – the metro, the Expo islands, roads like the Metropolitan and the Ville‐Marie, various school and college buildings – were such an achievement, that people kind of forgot they also had to be maintained. We’ve done it, now we can turn our attention to other things (for the most part, extracting Quebec from Canada, q.v.) and in the ensuing years all the asphalt and brutalist concrete have degraded, rebar poking out of the piers of the Met, the metro’s control system and escalators aging and being difficult to repair because the parts needed aren’t even made any more, HVAC systems so full of mold that the only thing to do is tear buildings down and start over – and meantime, downtown Montreal is putting up more and more tall buildings with everything feeding into a residential sewer system from the 1890s, and that’s if you’re lucky.
There’s a lot of catching up to do.
I like to put it this way (even if it’s a slight exaggeration): Quebec built $5-a-day daycare by eliminating Transport Quebec’s maintenance budget and getting rid of senior engineers. It took two bridges collapsing to convince a later government to re-examine budgets and start to re-establish road maintenance, and two decades later we’re still playing catchup.
>…but also a female.
You really think that has anything to do with it? Seems to me Luc Ferrandez got the same. Also, this article was written by a woman, shall we conclude anything from that?
I think by Occam’s razor, it’s Plant’s politics, not her sex, that gets her criticism.
Chris, maybe you haven’t seen the tone of some of her cruder critics, mocking her for being a witless little girl, etc. Not a tone people take with a man in power.
>Not a tone people take with a man in power.
Really? Perhaps you haven’t seen the tone of some of Trudeau’s cruder critics? Base ad hominem is used by many, against all. They’ll insult you for being a women, being old (Biden), being short, being fat (Chris Christie), or whatever. Plante gets the women insults because she’s a woman. If she was something else, she’d get those insults. Some people hate her politics and will rage however they can.
A cyclist was killed downtown Tuesday morning at the corner of Papineau and de Maisonneuve. In a familiar sad refrain, it happened under the wheels of a large truck. TVA goes on to tell us that the police closure of streets at that corner has sparked a traffic jam.
CBC later specified it was a tanker truck and La Presse brings the story: it was a hit‑and‑run and cops are trying to locate the vehicle and driver.
Yeah, I just heard that follow-up about it being a hit-and-run. Before that I assumed it was the large truck in the photos and videos from the TVA report, except that it made no sense it would be that truck given the positioning of the truck, the bike, the body, etc. It just wasn’t lining up. Now it makes more sense.
Is it a hit and run if the driver is unaware? I feel like it has to be deliberate for that to be accurate. (TVA suggests the driver of the truck was unaware; the other two do not say anything.)
I’ve been reading articles about truck side guards and I wonder what the regulations are here.
I think it’s still considered a hit-and-run, although it might be treated differently in court if it can be show that the driver was unaware. Bearing in mind that “hit-and-run” is just the colloquial way of saying it. Actual legal terms are different I think. “Leaving the scene…” etc.)
Three years ago, someone called in a hostage situation at Ubisoft on St‑Laurent at St‑Viateur. It triggered a huge police response and general panic but turned out to be a hoax. This brief piece in Metro says the accused was tried in France and sentenced to three years, but only identifies him with an initial (is this a French thing?).
Here’s a piece from 2021 in which the story is laid out in more detail, including the man’s full name and a bit about his history.
Denise Bombardier has died at 82. French Wikipedia has her bio.
RIP and condolences to her family but her voice being gone is a good thing. She had powerful influence with certain demographics that vote for Legault and her heel turn to full boomer white nationalist was not good for Quebec.
Speaking of Legault, his tweet on Monday to salute Quebec City for its 415th anniversary raised a few eyebrows:
415 ans et on résiste encore!
People have been asking in various ways what Quebec has been resisting for 415 years but answer came there none.
I think most of the mentions of Denise Bombardier around here have to with some hateful screed she had recently written. This tweet from Ruba Ghazal adds some colour to the portrait: https://twitter.com/RubaGhazalQS/status/1676294410248527872
@Joey – Musk has decided to prevent people not logged into their Twitter accounts, a fairly large chunk of the populace, from viewing tweets on the Twitter website. Can you summarize?
carswell, back in 1990, on a French talk show, where the host and several guests were all having a good giggle about the open predilections of French writer Gabriel Matzneff for sex with underage boys and girls, the only person to challenge him was Denise Bombardier. The Youtube clip.
French mores may have changed a little in the meantime. We discussed l’affaire Matzneff here in 2020, when the publication of a book by one of his victims ended in his books being purged from the Quebec library system, among other things.
Whoa. Thanks, Kate, though now I need a silkwood shower.
Her courage and integrity in calling out that revered pedophile only makes her swerve into racist nationalism in her later years that much more depressing.
La Presse’s Philippe Mercure examines the case of La Tulipe, a venerable Papineau Street venue, versus a ruling on noise, and concludes the city’s noise laws are outdated and unreasonable, given that some cultural venues cannot be expected to proceed in silence.
DeWolf 16:44 on 2023-07-04 Permalink
Based on that comment, the ARTM is actively trying to sabotage transit in Montreal. How can you have effective regional transit without grade-separated systems? You can’t.
(The comment also makes it sound like ARTM leadership is deeply insular, bigoted and racist, which isn’t a surprise.)
jeleventybillionandone 18:24 on 2023-07-04 Permalink
The racism bit in that comment is completely baffling to me, assuming the comment is reliable. Can someone unpack this attitude for me? Why will tramways make Montreal great again? Why is grade-separated transit only for sh*thole countries?
DisgruntledGoat 18:40 on 2023-07-04 Permalink
The original grade separated REM de l’Est proposal for 2029 completion and $10 billion is looking like a better deal and missed opportunity more and more every day.
Now transit to the east of the island is bogged down in the usual bureaucratic infighting and won’t happen.
I still remember all the public consultations with NIMBYS complaining, and all the hang-wringing on this blog about an affordable green transit solution “cleaving the urban fabric of the city”. Gimme a break.
Kate 18:46 on 2023-07-04 Permalink
I still don’t think it would’ve been a good idea to run an elevated train on René‑Lévesque.
Spi 19:46 on 2023-07-04 Permalink
That’s great Kate, now we have a still ugly R-L just with no transit. The ARTM has lost all credibility when it comes transit planning, they’re ok with dumping all the extra downtown bound ridership on to the green line because their logic is that the green line won’t reach capacity until 2050. So knowing that construction projects are always delayed by several years and that ridership numbers often undercount the peaks there’s a very real possibility that if this project materializes it would on day 1 max out the peak capacity of the green line, but hey the downtown segment was a doubling of service that wasn’t needed.
The shortsightness is astounding.
Anton 09:20 on 2023-07-05 Permalink
A comically bad proposal doesnt make a weak proposal better, at least in absolute terms. Then again, I dunno, maybe it does. Montreal transit seems like a lost case these days.
One thing that’s annoying is that people never demand good solutions, because everybody knows this is impossible here. Ppl just accept garbage, because at least its not shit.
bumper carz 14:10 on 2023-07-05 Permalink
Tramways are the way to go for mid-density suburbia, and if these surface transit vehicles slow down cars or take away lanes… so be it.
Andrew Weitzman 22:36 on 2023-07-05 Permalink
I know that elevated rail isn’t all that nice…but for eff’s sake, 36 billion for a completely underground version that doesn’t even provide downtown connectivity vs. a 10 billion CDPQ-Infra plan that does (well, let’s tack on 1-2 billion for the inevitable surpises) is a flamingly bad deal. Just run a Calgary-style high floor stadtbahn tram-train system for the ARTM route.
Forgetful 11:15 on 2023-07-06 Permalink
Andrew, nobody builds high floor tram systems anymore. Calgary, many European cities, and even German cities are either retrofitting lines for low floor rolling stock, or if they stick to high floor they upgrade the line to metro. There’s a lot of reasons for the switch to low floor, some good and some bad, but a lot of it is seemingly driven by aesthetics unfortunately.