Two men were shot in St‑Michel early Friday and both have died in hospital. These are the 19th and 20th homicides of 2024.
TVA says one of the victims was a local rapper, and this makes 11 rappers murdered here over three years.
Updates from July, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
TVA headlines this as a cyclist loses their life in a collision, but the vehicle shown is a scooter, not a bicycle. Still, grim story.
Blork
It’s actually one of those new breeds of scooters that has pedals so they can be classified as an e-bike and not require a license, etc. It a weird grey area in the law. I really wish they had their own category, because people like me who use pedal-assist e-bikes are using a completely different kind of vehicle (as far as I’m concerned) and should be regulated differently. Technically, those scootery “e-bikes” are supposed to be subject to the same limitations on power and speed as my bike, but many of them can easily go 40-50 or even 60kph.
CE
Often those pedals are fake. Some shops put them on so they can be used in bike lanes, the police don’t know the difference so as long as they have pedals, they allow them (to the detriment of all other users of the bike lanes).
Blork
Yes, but more often the pedals are “real” in that they work but are essentially vestigial, as no one uses them.
I follow some e-bike groups on FB and see loads of these things being discussed there, including “e-bikes” that look like a Kawasaki Ninja racing motorcycle except a bit smaller and they putter along at 32kph or so.
It will be interesting to see how it evolves. Some of the people I see on FB live in rural areas and commute several kilometres to work every day with no public transit options. They’re happy to have a vehicle that can get them to and from work quickly and cheaply without the expense and inconvenience of a car or a gas-powered motorcycle. I applaud them! But I also see the LIBARTÉ style yahoos that just want to race around the city or suburbs at high speeds without any restrictions or accountability.
I’m also seeing posses of young dudes zipping around on the bike paths over here on the south shore. The bike paths here are fantastic except for when three 14-year-olds on hopped-up “ebikes” that look more like motocross motorcycles show up, zipping around and creating a hazard.
Nicholas
I agree it’s a grey area, and it’d be best to clearly categorize them. An emerging standard is the Class 1, 2, 3 system, where, essentially, 1 is pedal-assistance only with no throttle and max 32 km/h; 2 is the same but with a throttle (meaning it’ll activate without pedalling); and 3 goes up to 45 km/h, has a speedometer, and may or may not have a throttle. (Anything more is a moped.) It’s common for the Class 3 bikes to be banned from bike lanes, have age limits, helmet requirements, etc. I know Quebec did its HSC rewrite six years ago and doesn’t have an appetite for big changes, but something is needed.
The Quebec Highway Safety Code doesn’t define bicycle, but all the definitions I looked at, in both languages, include pedals that drive the wheel, so if the pedals can theoretically propel you then they should fall under power-assisted bicycle, but if not then it’s a moped. But then a moped is defined as a passenger vehicle with two or three wheels, an electric or small cc motor, max 70 km/h and an automatic transmission, so some e-bikes could be mopeds. This just further highlights the need for better definitions.
SMD
The trauma team at the Children’s is calling on parents to make sure their children wear helmets on e-scooters, as they are seeing more and more injuries: https://globalnews.ca/news/10629766/montreal-childrens-hospital-e-scooter-injuries/.
Kate
Or they could not buy their kids e-scooters…?
Chris
If you live life according to trauma docs though, you’d need bubble wrap to leave your house for groceries. 😉
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Kate
A teenager already in police custody in Ontario was arrested this week over the shooting death of a 42‑year‑old man in a DDO parking lot in February.
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Kate
The construction holiday begins at 5 pm Friday. The next two weeks are typically the most dangerous on Quebec’s highways. Some road closures to be expected.
Some notes on the construction holiday.
Weekend highlights from La Presse, CityCrunch, CultMTL.
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Kate
It seems almost inevitable that the blue line extension is going to be more expensive and take longer than expected. It will be at least 2031 when it opens, and given the tone of this piece, I’d expect 2033 to be more realistic.
Robert H
« On attend cette ligne depuis tellement longtemps, donc c’est sûr que c’est décevant de savoir que ça va être plus long qu’anticipé. Cela dit, je ne peux pas dire que c’est étonnant »
No kidding. At this point, I just hope to live long enough to see it and use it.
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Kate
A failure in Microsoft software is affecting industries and systems worldwide. Some airlines are affected, so that’s causing some cancelled and delayed flights at Trudeau. I’ll add any other local effects here as they get reported.
I saw on social media last night one report that some Bixi stations had not been working properly, but I’ve no idea whether it’s part of this picture.
MarcG
I wonder how this is affecting hospitals… Uatu?
Blork
Not to be alarmist or anything, but this is a glimpse at the extent to which we are becoming dependent on our digital systems. A glitch in Microsoft Azure’s cloud system simultaneously with a bug in a third-party security update and look at the extent of the chaos. Now imagine the chaos (not if, but when) a malevolent actor (Russia? China?) decides to disrupt things on purpose in a war scenario.
There is no solution. We’re not going to backtrack on the global app-ification of human life. The 21st century is digital. And the 22nd century will be pandemonium because humans will no longer be in control and will not know how to do anything that isn’t computerized. The techno-utopians ought to pause and consider.
Just sayin! 🙂
Uatu
Everything seems to be ok where I am, but I can’t speak for the rest of the hospital
nau
Possibly related: Réno-Dépôt was cash only this morning.
Mozai
“Not to be alarmist or anything, but [rings alarm]”
The “solution” is to stop putting our eggs in one basket, even if it’s cheaper to do it that way. Doesn’t matter if it’s security consultants, medicine, liquor, car manufacturing, gasoline, gewgaws or whatchamacallits, if a broad span of businesses all depend on a single supplier, and that single supplier falls down, that broad span of businesses fall down with it. You don’t need to be a techno-utopian to be vulnerable to this; it’s a well-known fact in evolutionary biology what happens to a species that becomes hyper-efficient in their ecological niche.
This event isn’t because “computers bad,” its because we’re sacrificing resilience to gain competitive efficiency, and we can make that mistake even if we still used paper ledgers.
Kevin
Nau
That was related to this failure.Stop putting business majors in charge of companies, because they don’t understand the benefit of resilience/loyalty/reliability.
Blork
Exactly. When I say “there is no solution” what I mean is “there will be no solution” because we will always sacrifice resilience to gain competitive efficiency.
So yeah, it’s not “computers bad,” it’s “how we design and implement our systems via computers” that is bad, and I cannot see that ever changing.
walkerp
Also basically no regulation in the industry which allows for market dominance and then when somebody like Crowdstrike who are growing into the biggest cloud security company screws up it has major impact.
Jim Strankinga
‘basically no regulation in the industry’ lol.
walkerp
Looks like we got us a nerd, folks!
bob
Blork – AI isn’t what you think it is, and the systems that the internet depends on are already automated to the extent that no single person really knows how the whole thing works. Everything is already computerized and has been, effectively, for decades, depending on what you want to count as a computer. Your vision of the 22nd century has already happened. You don’t need some movie version general AI for systems to run themselves. Recall how WWI spun up outside of human control because they gave control to paper – treaties and war plans and mobilization schedules that no one could stop if they wanted to. Computers and code are not the system, they are the machines we have made to make the system work faster.
Kevin
Working faster is fine as long as the key people check and verify changes.
But companies now view verification as an incomprehensible expense instead of a core value, and so we end up with a company that no one heard of before today getting rubberstamped by the backbone of almost everything, and half the world shuts down.
jaddle
We aren’t going to stop using digital tools, but we can certainly move away from the ultra-consolidated monopolies that are currently ubiquitous. It’s a lot like ecological monocultures – if you have vast areas (farmland, cultivated “forests”, etc) populated by a single species, it doesn’t take much for a single disease or other environmental problem to wreak total havoc. A normal ecosystem is vastly more varied, so even a very nasty virus still leaves countless other species unaffected, and able to fill the gaps created. We need a lot more variety and competition in all our industries, especially in tech!!
Tee Owe
$$$ – if the companies involved had to to pay to compensate for all of this, then something might change – if not, then forget it
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