Fire station 26 on Mont-Royal, damaged by fire in 1999, and completely reconstructed since, had a fire on Thursday afternoon.
Here’s a view from 2014 and the state of the site in 2022. Pity they lost that lovely tree on the corner.
Updates from February, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Concordia and McGill are both taking Quebec to court over the tuition hikes for out‑of‑province students. Both claim that the measures constitute discrimination under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Story has made it to the BBC.
Uatu
Concordia and McGill students will also have more protests. It’s good to see more pushback to the caq
Ian
Hey and now that Coderre’s not in power they don’t have to worry about getting pepper sprayed and beaten by crazed thin blue line thugs.
Right?
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Kate
A robot called Néo will be cleaning Berri-UQAM station as a test project for a couple of weeks. Item says it uses artificial intelligence, but isn’t it basically a Roomba on a larger scale?
A recent report says Montreal’s metro is a world leader in stoppages due to user actions or mishaps.
24hres also asks why the Montreal metro is not as extensive as subway systems in other cities, even cities quite a lot smaller than Montreal. It’s an interesting point that we have a dislike here of redundancy, like ending the bus services across the bridge when the REM opened. As this piece says, transit redundancy is a good thing for passengers, giving them choices and making sure there’s backup if there’s a breakdown.
Nicholas
Redundancy is expensive. Having two services follow the same route is not usually a great use of funds. Having multiple routes is better, such as the orange and green lines downtown: it serves twice as many places, while giving options during a partial shutdown.
And user actions or mishaps would be reduced if we had platform screen doors.
And why we have less than other cities is because we can’t get our costs under control or plan right. The blue line extension is one of the most expensive in the world, and the tramways and REM de l’est are similarly world leading, as are train upgrades no one is proposing. The more each project costs, the less there is for other projects.
Joey
@Nicholas agreed, although I think there is more to the story – we are sort of stuck with an underpowered Metro system because for whatever reason (dubious procurement rules, widespread corruption in the construction industry) we can’t undertake Metro projects that aren’t ridiculously expensive. But that doesn’t explain the lack of consistent growth of the Metro system for the last 50 years. I suspect the political and economic situation of the mid-70s (stagflation, PQ coming to power, etc.) made it impossible to think big – but also really messed up the outlook for population growth in the Montreal region. I remember attending a CCA exhibit years ago showing planning documents from the 1960s and early 1970s, with Montreal projected to grow to 10 million residents within a few decades. To a certain extent the dynamic crystallized in the early 1980s and hasn’t really changed.
bumper carz
Former Quebec transportation minister Robert Poeti, caught lying in his new job as car-promoter.
Chris
Every company says their products use “artificial intelligence”. It’s a checkbox vendors list because purchasers want it (and vice versa). It can be defined to mean anything you want.
Blork
Redundancy is expensive, but so is lack of redundancy, as it reduces ridership due to less choice and higher levels of inconvenience for riders.
Regarding Néo the Roomba, I think the AI is part of its decision process in terms of where to go, where not to go, etc. based on fixed obstacles, moving obstacles (people), cleaning history, current state of cleanliness, pattern analysis of how busy an area is, etc. Compare that with a Roomba, which basically makes its decisions by bumping into things. (You can also place RF beacons to keep them out of certain areas, but that isn’t the Roomba making the decision, it’s the person who places the beacons. An AI bot should be able to make the decision itself without needing any beacons.)
dhomas
Roombas haven’t worked like that in ages, though. Newer vacuum bots have come a long way, with many of them using Lidar and/or cameras to better plan their routes. I suppose these newer models also have some form of “AI”, but not in the sense that most people are currently talking about AI. The big, recent advancements in AI are the progress toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), where AI will not only learn based on external input (which is basically just advanced machine learning) but will learn to make decisions on their own.
P
Apparently the metro isn’t as extensive as other cities because building a new line would come in at $327billion. Montreal will basically never have a new metro line, if we’re to believe those estimates.
Kate
dhomas, thank you for the notes on Roombas. I’ve never owned one, always having lived in old‑style Montreal flats with wooden floors, which are easily cleaned up with a quick brooming. I’ve only seen occasional meme videos.
Uatu
I’m just waiting to see how long it takes until someone beats the crap out of it.
Kate
Pushing it onto the tracks might be more likely.
MarcG
If we don’t get barriers to save human lives maybe we’ll get them to protect expensive bots.
Ian
It looks almost exactly like the cleaning bots they use in WalMart. Kind of like a sad Dalek janitor.
They look pretty heavy but I bet you could flip one with a lever and fulcrum pretty easily. They also have some kind fo light sensor that looks like if it got spraypainted would pretty much immobilize the whole thing.
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Kate
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, CultMTL, Sarah’s Weekend List.
The Papineau-Leblanc bridge will be closed again all weekend. Other road closures.
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Kate
A man was shot in Montreal North on Thursday evening, but details are not forthcoming. He’s not expected to die.
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Kate
One in ten municipal politicians in Quebec elected in 2021 has resigned before the end of their term, or – like the mayors of Sherbrooke and Trois‑Rivières – has taken a mental health break from their role. Among other things, it’s suggested it’s simply partly because city politics is the most accessible to ordinary people, so municipal politicians receive the most abuse. This follows the sudden resignation of the mayor of Gatineau on Thursday.
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