A collision between a CN train and an Exo train in St‑Léonard on Tuesday evening is under investigation by the Transportation Safety Board. Nobody got hurt.
Update: Later reports said there were minor injuries.
Updates from November, 2023 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
OCPM chief Isabelle Beaulieu, who has served in the post since February 2022, was sacked on Tuesday following the expenses scandal.
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Kate
The city has laid off all its crossing guards while the teachers’ strike continues. No other town in Quebec is cutting off its crossing guards’ payment in the same way (but then no other town has 550 of them, I’m sure).
Update: H. John comments below that this decision was reversed, and the crossing guards will not be penalized.
Nicholas
That’s one way to reduce the SPVM budget!
But seriously, school crossing guards are a failure in safety of our transportation system. It should be safe for kids to walk in their neighbourhood all the time, not just going to or from school right around those hours. We should be doing more to fix that problem.
Kate
I agree.
walkerp
That seems a very flippant response to this news. They play a very important role in the lives of parents and children. You get to know them when you walk your kid and you count on them very much when your child starts walking alone to school. Many of them are low income and their pay is an important revenue in their lives, so this move by the city will probably be relatively quite negative for them.
Frankly, it’s bullshit.Kate
walkerp, Nicholas has a point, though. If we have 550 spots in Montreal where it’s dangerous for kids to cross, it’s fundamentally dangerous for anyone to cross. It’s a confession that traffic lights, road signage and general road design aren’t working properly, or motorists are not responding to them, and these are things that need to be fixed.
I agree that crossing guards in general can be good and helpful people but the very existence of the job is a bandaid.
Bert
It seems to me to be quite petty of the City to do this. That said, are they placed where it “is dangerous” or just where they are most visible or at the greatest congestion points?
Kate, by extrapolation, the police and the military are also band-aids to larger civil problems.
H. John
Yves Boisvert just posted on X “La ville de Montréal paiera finalement les brigadiers pendant le conflit de travail”
walkerp
I hate cars and want them removed from our world altogether, but realistically we live in a city and there are going to be places where it is dangerous for kids to cross. This isn’t some failure that can be fixed. It is the nature of cars and cities. The solution is the crossing guard. It makes perfect sense and has ancillary benefits that are also important, for instance, a child has a human connection that isn’t their parent where they learn to develop a regular relationship, learn to be polite and grateful and that they live in a city which has its own communal fabric.
Anyhow, good news H. John. Glad they saw the sense and pulled back on that cheap decision.
Kate
Thank you, H. John!
Mark Côté
Bandaid or not, they are most definitely needed now. The number of drivers who don’t seem to understand that stopping at a crosswalk is mandatory is shockingly high, nevermind the number of people who only look for other cars when slowing down at a stop sign.
Meezly
Crossing guards are not a failure of our transportation system – they are a necessary part of the modern urban ecosystem. Every city in Canada has them. TO has over 800 crossing guards. Montreal may have more per capita due to urban density, number of schools, etc.
And further to walkerp. children are half the size of adults!! and thus, less visible to drivers, esp. on rainy days and when the sun sets at 4pm in the winter.
I do hope the city has decided to pay them during the strike. That was a bad move to cheap out on them.
Nicholas
At my elementary school there was a crossing guard at one of the four intersections on the block of the school. So 3/4 of kids didn’t have the safety of a crossing guard even for the block closest to the school. If you stayed after school for a program, you no longer had the safety of that one crossing guard, even though it was then rush hour (my school finished at 2:15, but activities usually lasted until 4-5). I was just over 1 km from school, so I had to cross at six intersections, none of which had crossing guards. Is all this danger acceptable?
Clearly we can’t have crossing guards at all intersections at all times. We have a dial that says Safety, and we can turn it towards more safe or less safe. Maybe we have the right balance now, maybe not. But we do spend money on this program, and we should think about how other uses of that money could potentially save more lives. If you raise the crosswalks, then the kids, who are short, are higher compared to the height of the car, and better visible by drivers. If you narrow the crossing distance, the kids are on the street for less time. And there are more systemic measures (managing vehicle heights, reducing speed, camera enforcement, etc.). I’m not saying to get rid of crossing guards tomorrow. But if our streets were safer, our kids would be as well, at all times and in all places.
Nicholas
Not to belabor the point, but here’s a study from Toronto, where they looked at intersections that added crossing guards vs ones that didn’t, and found guards did not decrease vehicle collisions: “There were 27,827 PMVCs [Pedestrian-Motor Vehicle Collisions], with 260 PMVCs at the locations of 58 newly implemented guards. Repeated measures adjusted Poisson regression found PMVCs rates remained unchanged at guard locations after implementation (IRR 1.02, 95 % CI 0.74, 1.39). There were 568 guards citywide with 1850 child PMVCs that occurred at guard locations. The majority of child PMVCs occurred outside school travel times (n = 1155, 62 %) and of those that occurred during school travel times, only 95 (13.7 %) were at a guard location.” (emphasis mine)
Other studies have shown that crossing guards increase the number of kids who walk to school, by making parents feel safer about letting their kids walk to school (though other studies dispute this). So it’s not that there’s no benefit at all. But the benefit is small, and as the study concludes, “Other more permanent interventions are necessary to address the frequency of child PMVCs occurring away from the location of crossing guards, and outside of school travel times.”
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Kate
Turbo Haüs bar on St‑Denis is fighting a noise complaint: “Nice to know it’s illegal to have des spectacles in the fucking quartier des Spectacles.” Instagram.
walkerp
This just makes me crazy in the head. I am trying in the spirit of charity to think of any reason why somebody would have a valid noise complaint who lives on St-Denis and unfortunately the spirit of charity is failing in me and my fury at these yuppie shitbags who want the cool culture but also their suburban zone of selfish isolation is the fury of the fire of a thousand suns.
jeleventybillionandone
This is ridiculous. I know Divan Orange succumbed to noise complaints, but wasn’t there the case also of a venue that had to shut because a condo for which permits should not have been issued was built next door? What was the name of that venue? Are there more examples?
DeWolf
You’re thinking of La Tulipe, and no, it didn’t have to shut down. But the court did order it to improve its soundproofing even more and pay damages (!!) to the person who had illegally converted his building into condos.
I’m wondering who actually lives close enough to Turbo Haüs to be bothered by any noise. That block of St-Denis has some hotels and short-term rentals and if I recall correctly, they were facing complaints by Airbnb guests before (lol).
dwgs
Noise complaints were also a factor in the death of Bobards.
Tim
@DeWolf: you are a little off on the details regarding La Tulipe. The city issued the license to convert that building to condos. So technically nothing illegal there by the owner. The fault is on the city. I also believe that the owner that did the reno’s then sold the condos, so if there were payments they would have gone to the current owner who submitted the complaints.
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Kate
The three-day Common Front strike is on.
MarcG
honk honk
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