More fallout from the terrasse shutdown fiasco on Peel Street: one restaurateur speaks of losing face, while the mayor apologizes for the chaos and says such a thing won’t happen again.
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Kate
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Kate
A young man channeling Gilles Villeneuve early Sunday on the Jacques‑Cartier bridge was caught doing 123 km/h and failed a breathalyzer test too. He won’t be driving for a bit.
Dominic
123km honestly doesnt seem like that different from the rest of the Montreal traffic.
Joey
Isn’t the limit on the bridge 50?
Kate
That’s what the article says, Joey.
Ian
Dom, sounds like you need to slow down 😉
dhomas
Is your last name Toretto? 😉
But seriously, on the highway, I would agree. The 40 east of the Anjou interchange is a 100 km/h zone. I’ll go 110 km/h (I know, I know), but I’ll regularly see cars going faster than me in the left lane.
But on that bridge, with that crazy curve at the end of it when coming in from the south shore, going that fast is extremely dangerous.Kevin
123 while intoxicated in the middle of the night. Some men just like to put the pedal down and wonder if it’s their time to burn.
Blork
Not to excuse this clearly irresponsible behaviour, but if someone’s going to go 123 in a 50 zone I’d rather they do it on the bridge where there are zero pedestrians, zero bicycles, no cross streets, and almost certainly no animals. At 3:40AM there were likely also no other cars (or at least very few). It’s better than doing 123 down Papineau or Sherbrooke.
Joey
@Blork he may have been caught on the bridge but it’s safe to assume he was speeding like crazy before he got on as well, no?
Blork
Joey, not necessarily. In fact, highly unlikely, because the approaches on both sides are very curvy. But once you’re on the bridge it’s like a 2.5 km drag strip, so it’s easy for a young bonehead to just let ‘er rip once the road straightens out. That time of night it’s like driving onto a runway at an airport: just wide, straight, uncluttered for 2+ km. VROOOOOM!
Blork
I mean imagine you’re a young bonehead with a few drinks in you and a hot car rumbling under your ass and you find yourself here at 3:40AM with no cars in sight: https://maps.app.goo.gl/HD5cjAA1Fuq4kAY69
From that vantage you’re already 500 metres in and you’re probably doing 70 or more anyway. You have a clear and wide path for another 700 metres before there’s a bit of a curve then another straight kilometre. Put the hammer down!
BTW, although the speed limit is 50, the “normal” speed on the bridge is more like 60 or 65 when traffic is light. By that I mean the entire flow of traffic is doing 60 or 65. Given there are no pedestrians, bicycles, animals, or cross streets, that doesn’t seem excessive, and when you’re actually doing it you feel like you’re going slow, as if you’re doing 65 in what feels like an 80 zone.
Different story when it gets very busy…
…and just for the record, I’m neither advocating for, nor defending, said speeding. Just trying to understand it in the context of the bonehead who did it.
Joey
Yeah, I didn’t mean that he was probably doing 120 off the bridge, more like he was probably consistently at double the speed limit of whatever road he was on (60 in a 30 zone, etc).
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Kate
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen has won his third straight Canadian Grand Prix in a race La Presse describes as une course folle.
nau
“They’re so depressing, going ’round and ’round
Ooh, they make me dizzy, oh fast cars they run me down
Fast cars, fast cars,
Fast cars, I hate fast cars”Francesco
@nau lol Buzzcocks put together one of my favourite Peel Sessions
nau
@Francesco Definitely an excellent band from their era.
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Kate
I also gather from many media mentions that the last‑minute cancellation by Pitbull, scheduled to perform at parc Jean‑Drapeau on Saturday, has made a lot of people angry. Madhouse at Jean‑Drapeau metro station.
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Kate
CBC reports that residents of Chinatown are worried about safety around the daycare and are calling on the city to do more for the homeless and the drug use in their neighbourhood.
Fair enough, but is the city to blame? A quick look finds that cities all over the West are coping with the same problem. Toronto, Boston, New York, London, Paris, cities in Spain, Italy, even in northern Europe, which we tend to think manages things better than most places: Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam. Not enough new housing is being built anywhere, and new buildings are mostly pitched at the elite. The homeless have access to far stronger drugs than we’ve faced in the past. Nobody has solutions for this complex problem. It’s a big‑picture issue, and cities can only offer bandaid solutions.
I’m not saying this entirely excuses the city. But what can even the police do? Round people up – and then what?
Ian
Housing is both a human right and a profitable asset, and that’s the problem.
“It seems like everyone is talking about housing these days. For many, it is in a state of crisis. But for others, it is a market doing exactly what it should be doing: making money. The crux of the housing problem is that it is both a basic human right and a commodity from which to extract wealth.
Most housing debates largely ignore this contradiction. Those who oppose new developments and those who believe we need more housing both focus on numbers, design, zoning and density. These perspectives miss key questions about housing for whom, against whom, who profits and who is excluded.
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To make cities affordable, upzoning will need to consist primarily of new social housing and other forms of ownership such as co-ops and rent-controlled apartments that are off limits to speculators.”Chris
>But what can even the police do? Round people up – and then what?
One idea some jurisdictions have tried or will try is forced rehab.
Kate
Why Forced Addiction Treatment Fails
(A thing that surprised me in that NYTimes article is the repeated mention of family. My impression has usually been that the homeless – the true homeless, people who’ve been in the street for awhile and may never have known, or have forgotten, any other way to live – don’t have family, for all kinds of reasons.)
Kevin
There’s a lot of room between forcibly institutionalizing someone and the free-for-all that we currently seem to have.
I think that at some point, some govt will pass a law curtailing the rights of those caught up in addiction courts, and I only hope that said govt will adequately fund and train the caregivers responsible for shepherding addicts.Kate
How do you punish someone who hasn’t got anything? People passing laws think in terms of fining or, if need be, jailing somebody who refuses to obey. But if you have no resources, fining is a futile exercise, and if you have no home and no anchors to continuous existence like a job or a partner, jail is actually an offer of a roof over your head and basic food.
So if you go to a guy in the street and say “Get in the wagon and go to rehab or else!” what have you got for “or else”?
Kevin
Kate
I agree with you.
The people being brought in for thefts to fund a drug addiction don’t think of anything beyond the next hit, and our jails don’t have the room or the resources to treat them, and the crimes are individually minor so they get released after short terms.There is no cheap solution, and there certainly is no easy solution.
Joey
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? Too bad we cut cut cut our over the last few decades such that we now need many ounces of prevention as well as even more pounds of cure. Obviously Montreal/Quebec is not unique, but there doesn’t seem to be much help on the way…
MarcG
Some men just like to put the pedal down and wonder if it’s their time to burn.
MarcG
(In response to Joey’s comment about our society having no foresight or ability to care in case that’s not clear)
Tim S.
MarcG: I think it’s important to remember that those men have names. Chretien. Martin. Bouchard. Manning, among others.
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Kate
The HEC has done a study comparing the cost of driving, cycling and walking in Montreal and it turns out that driving is by far the most expensive way to commute. They also found that the car has taken an even more dominant role since the pandemic, as transit ridership has fallen. The impact of the trend to work from home isn’t accounted for.
Ian
Time also hasn’t been accounted for.
Let’s say I get paid 65k a year. Let’s say I’m on the clock for 37.5 hours a week, and get paid for 50 weeks a year because I get 2 weeks off but no vacation pay because I’m a consultant. So that’s about $34.66 an hour, let’s round it to $35/h.
So let’s say it takes me an hour and a half to get to work by transit. It would be 2 hours by bike, at least in the summer, but let’s focus on transit for now. So let’s say I take transit, that’s 3 hours a day devoted to my work day – but not getting paid. So my commute by transit costs me 17.5k a year in lost time.
Now, a commute is a commute, so there will always be some lost time, but let’s say instead of three hours a day I drive and it takes 45 minutes each way. This means my lost time is reduced to 1.5 hours a day, or $8750 a year. Assuming I drive a 7 year old used vehicle I bought without a loan, amortizing the purchase cost over 5 years, that’s more than the driving & ownership costs according to the CAA driving cost calculator.
Even if you don’t work that extra hour and a half a day, just having an extra hour and a half a day is pretty awesome. It can’t necessarily be quantified, but it has value. Just like how “nobody ever says on their deathbed they wished they spent more time at the office” as the saying goes, nobody ever wishes they spent twice as long on their commute.
CE
Economics is indeed the quintessential counter argument to any environmental argument.
Ian
In case you didn’t notice, the first point brought up by Kate was, in fact, an economic argument.
Go sealion somewhere else – we are trying to have a conversation here.Kate
Ian, CE is a valued participant here, please don’t do that.
In any case, he was quoting Chris from a few posts ago – not that it isn’t a legitimate point.
Ian
He was being dismissive of me, I was responding in kind. It was funny when Chris did it, because it was contextual. CE was taking a cheap shot.
That aside, we already had a good discussion about how it does not cost 16 grand to own a car, just last week.
Kate
I won’t judge on CE’s motivation, but let’s keep it cordial.
Blork
The study cited in the article is primarily about the SOCIAL (i.e., shared/public) costs of the various methods. You don’t need to do a study to determine that owning and operating a car is typically more expensive than owning and operating a bicycle. Public transport is also less expensive than owning and operating a car for the individual but not necessarily for a family (four A+B monthly OPUS cards will run a family more than $600 a month, which — depending on usage patterns — could be more than owning a car).
But again, the study and the article are about the SOCIAL costs. OK, that’s fine, but I take exception to some of the interpretations offered (which may or may not be correctly interpreted in the article, and we’ll never know because the goddamn article doesn’t link to the study).
For example, the article says:“Les chercheurs rappellent au passage que si chaque automobiliste ayant un trajet aller simple de 10 kilomètres ou moins – le plus souvent vers le travail ou l’école – prenait le vélo ou le transport collectif, des économies de l’ordre de 1,7 milliard pourraient être dégagées chaque année.”
It should be pointed out that this $1.7 billion is theoretical and will only be seen if the pattern described is pervasive enough to result in a long-term change in the infrastructure. It’s not like those savings would happen tomorrow just by having a few people ride their bikes to work.
It’s like saying if your apartment’s rent is costing you $40 a day, you can save $80 a month by staying over at your girlfriend’s house every second Saturday. No. It doesn’t work like that. You still have to pay the rent whether you’re spending the night at home or not. Similarly, the roads and other infrastructure are still there, and being maintained (sort of) even if a few people decide to occasionally take their bikes or the Metro to work.
That said, the value of this study isn’t in determining the obvious (that it costs more to operate a car than a bike or an OPUS card). The value is in showing where the public money goes, and by how much, and how increased use of public transport and active transport (bicycling etc.) can, OVER TIME, result in somewhat less need to spend so much on the roads and road infrastructure. (Also bearing in mind that roads are not just used to allow people to drive to work.)
CE
Re: my comment. My motivation was not malicious, it was supposed to a bit of a joke but it didn’t land because I thought it was Ian who had made the original comment (“Economics is indeed the quintessential counter argument to any environmental argument”).
I think some context is necessary because Chris usually makes these types of comments to play the “devil’s advocate” (to put it diplomatically) whereas Ian’s comments tend to be well thought out and insightful (even if I don’t always agree with them). Because I thought the the sentence I copy and pasted was a comment made by Ian, I saw it in a different light than I do now that I see it was made by Chris.
I think you can see how it was would have been a joke pointing out a contradiction if the comment had originally been made by Ian. I hope this explanation makes sense.
My apologies Ian. It was supposed to be a joke but obviously didn’t work because I didn’t pay enough attention to who had made the original comment.
Ian
Well at the risk of falling all over each other with apologies, I apologize for mistaking your intent.
PEACE BE UPON US AND OUR PEOPLE, HENCEFORTH AND ALWAYS. I hope I did that right.I mean yeah of course the environmental question is pretty obvious, walking is the best way to get around… and it’s also the cheapest. I’m pretty sure my 54 year old feet are well past their amortization period though.
Kevin
Kate
Everyone is forgiven!
Ian
@Kevin tx for the link, good find.
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Kate
By the quantity of reportage I gather it’s quite impressive that Montreal has been selected along with Boston to host the Four Nations Face-Off hockey tournament next February. The four nations involved are Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Finland.
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