The city wants to take control of positioning photo radar, something Quebec controls from afar.
Updates from February, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
There’s a smog warning in effect for an area of southern Quebec that includes Montreal.
Update: Smog warning’s still up on Thursday morning.
walkerp
I thought it seemed hazy and nasty out.
Joey
I had to drive over the mountain this morning. There was a band of bright blue sky visible above a band of greige haze – I figured it was smog.
Ian
Road dust maybe? It tasted pretty salty out today.
MarcG
And here’s another way that a clean air policy would help us. The future is staring us in the face, let’s get on it.
Mozai
Environment Canada says it’ll be okay Friday… after the predicted rain? https://weather.gc.ca/airquality/pages/qcaq-001_e.html
Ian
Wow good thing nobody’s allowed to have fireplaces anymore (except the independent boroughs of course) so we solved that smog problem eh
Does anyone really believe that fireplaces were the cause of smog, still?
MarcG
It would be a lot worse with all of that wood smoke trapped down here on top of everything else. But yeah we would probably be better off if we electrified everything and kept the fireplaces.
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Kate
The STM has started testing their new electric buses out in Blainville, although the “conditions extrêmes” mentioned here haven’t exactly been provided by the season.
Meantime, deadlines set for work on extending the Blue Line have been pushed to accede to the consortium that will dig the tunnel.
dhomas
So, I don’t quite understand the exact details of the ownership model of the REM, but isn’t it 50% owned by government agencies? Therefore, don’t “we” have 50% ownership of “Alice”, the REM’s TBM? https://rem.info/en/actualites/TBM-alice-finishes
Is there any reason we couldn’t reuse Alice to bore the Blue Line extension? Has this ever been considered? Why do we need to get another, different company to submit tenders for digging the tunnel? There may be a technical limitation (different tunnel size, for example), but I don’t know enough about it.
Kate
Can those machines be moved? My impression is that they’re mostly assembled on site and that by the time the main task is finished, they’re worn out.
Nicholas
dhomas, you’re right, they’re different tunnel sizes. The REM is 7.38 m in diameter, while the Blue Line is 9.6 m, using its own TBM. These machines are custom-designed for their specific project: even if the diameter was the same, it’s really hard to disassemble and move these machines, so it’s usually cheapest just to bury it on site. We could, of course, have avoided the cost of these TBMs by building a project from the south (for the airport) or cut-and-cover (for the Blue Line), like was done for the Green Line downtown, but people don’t like the disruption anymore, so we just spend a lot more on TBMs, meaning fewer km and fewer stations.
Kate
I’ve seen pics of how they excavated Berri all the way through Villeray to build the orange line. You’d never know it, walking along there today. But I guess there’d be an unholy fuss if they proposed to dig up kilometres of Jean‑Talon.
Anton
The REM uses a consortium to do the construction (i.e. contractors). I doubt they own the machines used for construction.
Also, REM is owned slightly less than 50% by govts, the Caisse has control.
mare
AFAIK Tunnel Boring Machines *are* sometimes reused, but there has to be room for them to slope upwards and tunnel themselves to the surface at a shallow angle. If they’re in a built up environment or there’s a highway blocking them they can’t do that and it’s expensive to have them bore a long extra stretch to ‘save themselves’. They can’t backup to the last big hole to the surface, like a station, so a special shaft has to be dug to excavate them. If they’re deep under existing infrastructure that’s expensive so often it’s not worth it, because they’re worn out and need a complete revision anyway. They often take them apart as much as possible, and reuse or recycle the salvaged parts.
dhomas
I spoke to a civil engineer with knowledge on TBMs who told me that this would be a very good reuse scenario (this was before I told him about the difference in tunnel diameter), provided it was not cheaply built to be ‘single-use’. TBMs are very difficult to transport. For example, Alice was built in Ohio and shipped piece by piece to be assembled here in Montreal. Being needed in the same city limits the transport / dissassembly costs, which increases the reusability score. They also have already-trained operators and specialists. Another plus. They would, however, likely need to replace some parts that get worn out during a boring project. But it’s all moot since Alice is likely too small for our metro. It’s too bad.
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Kate
A Montreal man has been charged with uttering death threats to Justin Trudeau on X.
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Kate
The Globe and Mail reports that, since tuition hikes for out‑of‑province students, applications have fallen at Concordia and McGill by roughly a quarter. La Presse reveals that the minister’s own consulting committee recommended against the tuition hike.
Speaking of Concordia, here’s a piece by Lawrence M. Krauss deriding Concordia’s plan to decolonize engineering.
Chris
Applications are down, but there are still more applicants than available seats. I suppose the average student strength could decrease though.
Ugh, that CRT/DEI stuff has been mostly confined to the humanities, but it’s been coming for the hard sciences too in recent years.
DeWolf
“The Indians were illiterate hunter-gatherers with no conception of formal learning of any kind, let alone advanced study. But they will now take over our universities?” — Quillette reader
MarcG
Here’s an article from Politico on that Quillette website https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/11/intellectual-dark-web-quillette-claire-lehmann-221917, but you can get the gist from glancing at the homepage.
Brett
That Politico article is over 5 years old and hopelessly outdated.
Paul
Just because they applied, doesn’t mean they will accept an offer. I would bet McGill still fills all the seats but the quality of the applicants goes down. Toronto’s gain, our loss.
MarcG
Kate, you’ve summoned the “just asking questions” gang with that link. Expecting Bill Binns to rise from the dead.
Meezly
That was a truly colonized think piece by Krauss.
walkerp
Yeah, Quillette is “not serious” as the kids say today. I would be reluctant to post links from them without at least a disclaimer that they are basically a pseudo-intellectual Fox news.
Kate
I’d never even heard of Quillette before today. Shall I delete the link and the comments that follow?
Meezly
Never heard of it either before today. I think it’s good to know that such sites exist though, so I agree with walkerp about posting a disclaimer when linking to pseudo-intellectual sites.
I was reading about Quilliette and how some prominent thinkers like Richard Dawkins are fans. I had admired his pro-atheism stance in the past, but was not aware until now that he held controversial views re: Islam and the trans community.
H. John
I don’t think Concordia has much to learn from the Jeffrey Epstein defending Lawrence Krauss whose own university career was ended by complaints of sexual misconduct.
A paragraph from an Atlantic article about him stands out:
“Some scientists, especially vociferously atheist scientists like Krauss, pride themselves in their ability to rise above certain biases, in their work and in social systems at large. They believe that science, as a concept, will safeguard against them.“Science itself overcomes misogyny and prejudice and bias. It’s built-in,” Krauss said last year during a promotional event for one of his books.”
bob
Meh. If you set aside the grumpy old fuddy duddy vibe it points to the phenomenon of universities marketing themselves with “strategic plans” and “action plans” and “bold initiatives” and “new directions” (read: performative and recitative gestures) that are completely irrelevant in regard to the sausage making that academia really is. I’ve seen several of these processes at Concordia from the inside, and they have all been fatuous, producing reports that report nothing anyone didn’t already know, glossy pamphlets with titles like “Moving Forward” and lovely photographs of shiny new buildings and stately old ones — and reams of high falutin’ aspirational prose, ignored even by the few people who bother to read it. This particular initiative is no more or less silly than the others. Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.
I have a theory of advertising. If you have a truly great product, pick some words describing it and tell it on the mountain. If you have a truly terrible product, pick some words describing it, then say the opposite. Concordia’s words are “Bold. Daring. Innovative. Transformative.”
Ian
I think it’s great when you bring out this kind of article because for some reason the creeps that hang out here just can’t resist identifying themselves. It makes it easier to know whose rants to ignore.
DeWolf
It’s hard to wrap my mind around the idea that science and maths, which are things created by humans, are somehow immune to human fallibility.
Nobody is arguing that 1+1=3, they’re saying the systems built using those equations are as prone to biases and destructive impacts as any other kind of system. If there’s a problem, it’s not with the engineering itself, it’s with the engineers.
But then again I studied social science, not “actual” science, so what do I know.
DeWolf
Kate’s comment in another thread about the biases inherent in AI is a perfect example of why the sciences need DEI.
Ian
I teach STEM and DEI is a core of our work in the form of universal accessibility as described WCAG 2.0, ISO/IEC 40500:2012. Anyone who thinks this isn’t relevant hasn’t been keeping up.
DeWolf
… or they have an ideological axe to grind, or maybe just a dogwhistle to blow.
Ian
Por que no los dos 😀
JaneyB
Re: Quillette – I disagree with Walkerp on the merits of Quillette. Their podcast is fairly centrist I would say, maybe a little to the right sometimes but much, much less than the standard Conservative party positions. Jonathan Kay (Nat Post, former editor of the Walrus, Montrealer) is often very subtle and I’ve heard him absolutely skewer some right-wing interviewees. The target audience for Quillette is something like ‘centrist contrarian’ but also largely comfortable for the general voting population in Canada. It’s far too culture-y to be a hit with the Convoy Protesters, for instance but the average liberal arts student would consider it radical right.
Affie S.
If there is one area where credential-ism absolutely trumps all other qualifications, it is the education field.
Seen that so many times in my time as a parent. Competence is not nearly so highly valued, and that is the educational issue of our modern era that I think needs solving.
steph 12:23 on 2024-02-08 Permalink
Despite my disdain for police, I’m an advocate for more photoradar. Tons of photo radar. everywhere photo radar. You want a photo radar on your street? -You get a photo radar on your street. Stop signs, red lights, speeding,
Many insurance companies use phone apps (that use the phones GPS and accelerometer) for tracking the quality of your driving. This can lead to a lowered or increased insurance rate. Why not use trackers on cars and enforce the rules of the road? Why not bankroll our coffers with reckless driving.
Ian 22:14 on 2024-02-08 Permalink
I hear what you’re waying and agree to some extent, but inviting cops to freely surveil everyone for the sake of trqffic control is a terrible idea.