Royalmount: traffic is a concern
There’s a photo of the Royalmount pedestrian link over Decarie on this CBC piece and maybe it’s just the angle, but that thing…! Nobody could make Decarie even uglier? Hold my beer, says Carbonleo.
In addition, there’s concern that the walkway is not sufficient, and extra road space will be needed for all the millions of cars wanting to access the area.
What if they held a mall development and nobody came?
Blork 09:55 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
Carbonleo CEO Andrew Lufty said the pedestrian overpass is “transformative for Montreal, for our society, for our planet” so I guess it must be true and has no overblown hype at all, just like the rest of the project.
Kate 09:57 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
He also says “We’ll probably drive about 20 million visits or passengers through the sky bridge on an annual basis.” I like that verb. Definitely isn’t thinking of people as a herd of cattle or sheep!
Joey 10:24 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
That angle is useful to get a sense of the thing but not a viewpoint most of us will ever have. Not exactly Architectural Digest material, but it might not look so bad when the whole thing is built. Decarie is so ugly it’s almost glorious.
Blork 10:39 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
Yeah, it definitely looks like a walkway created by a junior IKEA designer who is used to working with Meccano sets. Definitely optimized for “cheap” not “beautiful.” But if it was more elegant (imagine a rounded swoop and less clunky attachment to the piers) then maybe it would stand out weirdly and draw attention to the ugliness around it. Lipstick on a pig!
Spi 10:42 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
There are construction compromises that have to be made, if you want to minimize the impact on decarie then you pretty much have to design something that can be craned into place and that means something that can be pre-built. It’s hard to build a prebuilt structure without making it look like it was well prebuilt.
Nicholas 11:51 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
We’re complaining about the aesthetics here? Decarie is a waste land and nothing short of blowing it up and restarting will change that (or maybe decking it over, but the service roads and car-oriented development would still be there). This is not going to happen, as much as I would like it. And since pedestrians will be inside it mostly, they won’t spend much time looking at it from the outside. This is like my friends saying the REM is ugly on the West Island, when the 40 and service roads and parking lots are right there! Sometimes cheaper is better. Hopefully we can spend our money making other places nicer.
Ian 11:57 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
Sure it’s ugly, but let’s be realistic – this is what it looked like before:
https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5005489,-73.6617811,3a,75y,240.22h,85.31t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s92Z4XBN__Lf8HTh2RlQDqw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
More egregious, I think, is the sci-fi utopia that artist’s rendering of the fully constructed mall compex. The only thing missing is some flying cars and white people in togas.
Uatu 16:34 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
Hope there’s security. Looks like a great place for the homeless to squat or pedestrians to get mugged.
JaneyB 17:08 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
According to the article, ‘younger people who represent the majority of luxury shoppers, will be coming by metro.’ Yes, if there’s two things I naturally connect, it’s youth and expensive shopping habits,…followed closely by public transit use for high-end shopping. Utter nonsense from these people. When does it end?
GC 17:34 on 2024-03-27 Permalink
Yeah, that raised my eyebrows, too. Regardless of the age bracket of luxury shoppers, surely most of them do not arrive by public transit?
The prediction that 2/3rds of shoppers will arrive by transit also elicited some side-eye. The article doesn’t mention how the developers arrived at this estimate, other than wishful thinking. I wonder if that’s even true of the underground malls downtown. I suspect it’s not even close to true for Dix30.
Ian 18:49 on 2024-03-28 Permalink
Bored teens taking a metro to Ardene is one thing, but wealthy bored late milennials luxury shopping via the loser cruiser? Good luck.