Took this shot from the window of the 55 bus on Thursday around 2, middle of a downpour. It was cruising down St‑Urbain with the rest of the traffic. Anyone got any idea what it is? It reminded me of that old party bicycle that used to be seen around the Plateau but it didn’t look human‑powered, although I couldn’t be sure with all those umbrellas in the way. At any rate it didn’t look very festive in the rain.
Updates from April, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, La Presse, CultMTL. CityCrunch also has a list of current art exhibits and Time Out has a list of cool things to do around town.
Various driving crises of the moment: The Papineau‑Leblanc bridge will be closed on the weekend, the La Fontaine tunnel will be closed at night and here are the other places you can’t drive.
CultMTL’s annual best of Montreal voting is open.
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Kate
A suspect in the random punching of a woman at Lionel‑Groulx last week has been arrested. CTV describes the victim solely as the daughter of columnist Nathalie Collard, but she is also the daughter of Richard Martineau.
Afterthought: TVA’s headline is “La femme qui a agressé la fille de Richard Martineau est arrêtée”. To my understanding, you don’t convict people in the media. The proper form is that the woman is accused of the assault; she is a suspect. She hasn’t been tried or convicted yet. Does QMI not even notice they’re doing this, or have they simply decided they can get away with it?
Blork
Apparently the random punching of women on the street is a bit of a thing in New York at the moment. FFS! https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/nyregion/new-york-city-random-attacks-women.html?unlocked_article_code=1.kE0.A13T.iXhIIN8GgM8G&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=m&sgrp=c-cb
bob
What does an “agitated” woman bounding out of a metro car have to do with that?
Blork
bob, just noting that “punch a random woman” is a trend in New York, and wondering if it isn’t spreading, as stupid things often do.
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Kate
Radio-Canada covered this story recently, and now CBC asks the same question why construction near Berri-UQAM is taking so long.
Ian
The Outremont metro station has been under constrution since 2021. Parts of Ste Catherine have been closed off to construction for well over 5 years. Pins & Docteur-Penfield has been under construction for various reasons for well over 10 years now with no end in sight.
This is Montreal. 2 years is nothing.
CE
Beaubien between Clark and Parc seems to get torn up every year for what feels like the last decade. I don’t know what’s going on under that street!
bob
It’s kind of pathetic how corruption has become so normalized as a reason for these things. “Oh, maybe it’s the weather, or the soil, or more rats, or sun spots, or vibrations from the light poles because of the extra wind from climate change, balh blah blah.” It’s been so woven into the way things are done that the elements of the crimes become virtues.
Kate
There are excuses that make some sense. In the case of Outremont station, wasn’t it specifically difficult to add an elevator? And I can believe it that doing excavation work around sites like Berri‑UQAM and McGill can run into unexpected elements from earlier construction. But that doesn’t explain Beaubien, which shouldn’t have such a lot of underground stuff going on.
I tend to rely on Hanlon’s razor – Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But I admit that rule doesn’t leave wiggle room for corruption.
Ian
The elevator at Outremont metro has been installed & there is full public access but the station is still under construction. I believe it’s mostly exterior work now, burt there’s no clear end in sight.
mare
Beaubien is not just an average street, but there’s a major satellite TV receiver station of Videotron on that stretch, but I’ve no idea if that has anything to do with the repeats or length of the work there. There’s definitely a whole lot of cabling in the ground there, and boy-o-boy would many people be unhappy when their favourite TV station suddenly wasn’t available anymore.
CE
How long did Mont-Royal station take to do? It felt like the plaza around the station was closed forever. Tangibly related: which STM bureaucrat’s nephew got the contract to make the “public art” in the upper level of that station? The STM has a long history of putting excellent art in its stations, whatever you call what they put in this station is a far cry from that history (and in a station with sculptures by Charles Daudelin)!
MarcG
Here’s a pic I found of the horrors for anyone else who hasn’t been to Mont-Royal station since the renos.
CE
That’s not even the worst of it!
Kate
MarcG, that is not good at all.
mare: I did not know that about Videotron. Is the satellite TV receiver station disguised as something else? (Please tell me it’s the spires of St‑Édouard church!)
DeWolf
A lot of these are multi-year road reconstruction projects that are being done in different phases. Beaubien between Park and Clark is being completely redone, with preparatory work done in the past few years and a full reconstruction slated for next year.
With long projects it’s easy to think they’re dragging on endlessly but that’s not necessarily the case. Pine Avenue was done on time and on budget, with each section of the entire street rebuilt in about a year. That’s hardly out of the norm for a project of that scale.
Similarly, Ian seems to be under the impression that Ste-Catherine has been closed for five years, but I can’t think of a single section of the street that has been under construction for that long. The work has been going on in phases moving east to west. The project will continue until 2030 so it shouldn’t be a surprise that at any given time, some part of the street is closed for construction. How do you rebuild 2.5km of busy road otherwise?
This isn’t to say there aren’t a lot of badly managed projects in Montreal. But I think most of the major projects are no better or worse here than in any other city. I don’t see any road reconstructions happening faster in other places.
But there is a real problem here and it’s the vast number of smaller roadworks that are poorly coordinated and which take way too long. That’s the big reason it feels like there is endless construction, and probably the biggest difference with other cities. It shouldn’t be normal for streets to be closed for weeks just so Hydro-Québec or the CSEM or some other entity can do underground work for a couple of days. And it certainly shouldn’t the case when a freshly reconstructed street is torn up for some minor works just a couple of months after it reopened (which was the case on Pine).
DeWolf
Also, for anyone wondering about some of the major road reconstruction projects, the city has lots of info on their website. For example, here’s the page outlining how they’re redoing all the streets in Mile-Ex including Beaubien:
https://montreal.ca/articles/reamenagement-des-rues-du-secteur-marconi-alexandra-16449
The STM outlines its various projects on its website. Outremont metro is going to be under construction until autumn 2024:
https://www.stm.info/fr/infos/etat-du-service/travaux/outremont
Kate
Thank you, DeWolf. Let’s just hope they don’t impose bad artwork on Outremont station like they have on Mont‑Royal.
Ian
The station itself is open but the exterior work is ongoing, maybe there will be a mural of a clown.
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Kate
A clinic specifically for indigenous people has opened here, which integrates traditional practices with western medicine.
Ephraim 11:21 on 2024-04-13 Permalink
It’s the party bike! https://montreal.urbanpedaltours.com/
MarcG 11:23 on 2024-04-13 Permalink
I think it’s the same vehicle, I see pedals.
carswell 11:24 on 2024-04-13 Permalink
It’s a pedal pub aka a party bike. There’s a narrow bar down the middle, a driver-bartender in front and patron seats with pedals along each side. Saw them in action on St-Laurent and St-Urbain in Mile End last summer. The patrons were obviously smashed and so not very adept at propelling the vehicle, which appeared to create guidance problems for the driver. The bike was moving much slower than surrounding traffic and having issues staying in its lane. Combine that with the noise and air pollution from vehicular traffic and the precarious-appearing open-sided seating with bums and limbs only inches away from speeding cars and it didn’t strike me as a place anyone sane would want to be.
Blork 13:04 on 2024-04-13 Permalink
Oh Cripes I hate those things. The original type had everyone facing forward, and people would rent them out to companies downtown during the summer for “team building” exercises, where that thing would zip up and down de Maisonnuve and Ste-Catherine, and sometimes go flying down McGill-College. There was loud thumping music and a DJ yelling inane DJ thing and encouraging everyone to “MAKE SOME NOISE!” Of course they’d be making said noise right under my office window on de Maisonneuve. It would startle and annoy me every time. Probably two or three days a week in summer those things would be zipping around for a couple of hours in the middle of the day.
These second-generation ones have a bar and the riders face each other, which is interesting from a mechanical engineering point of view but even more stupid from a “why must this shit exist?” perspective. I don’t think those ones are used so much for “team building” and charity fund raising like the other ones. These ones are rented out to bachelor parties and other boozy events, and are a yet another sign of the coming social apocalypse.
Blork 13:06 on 2024-04-13 Permalink
…and by “zipping” I mean crawling along at a snail’s pace while overweight and out-of-shape accountants and sales people pedalled madly, risking heart attacks and other coronary disasters.