Montreal City Weblog

Kate 05:20 on 2024-04-13 Permalink Reply  

• Ian 11:19 on 2024-04-13 Permalink

  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 12:27 on 2024-04-13 Permalink

  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 13:11 on 2024-04-13 Permalink

  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 14:56 on 2024-04-13 Permalink

  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 19:39 on 2024-04-13 Permalink

  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 22:16 on 2024-04-13 Permalink

  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 22:43 on 2024-04-13 Permalink

  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 08:27 on 2024-04-14 Permalink

  Here’s a pic I found of the horrors for anyone else who hasn’t been to Mont-Royal station since the renos.

• CE 09:10 on 2024-04-14 Permalink

  That’s not even the worst of it!

• Kate 10:06 on 2024-04-14 Permalink

  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 11:45 on 2024-04-14 Permalink

  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 11:52 on 2024-04-14 Permalink

  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 11:56 on 2024-04-14 Permalink

  Thank you, DeWolf. Let’s just hope they don’t impose bad artwork on Outremont station like they have on Mont‑Royal.

• Ian 20:53 on 2024-04-14 Permalink

  The station itself is open but the exterior work is ongoing, maybe there will be a mural of a clown.