Seems unwise scheduling to have the big tennis tournament overlap with the Olympics, but that’s the deal, causing Novak Djokovic to withdraw from the Montreal tourney in hopes of winning gold in Paris.
Updates from July, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Communauto is struggling with its popularity this summer as it faces a shortage of new cars.
Ian
I’ve noticed some real beaters in the fleet this year with crunched in doors, bad scrapes, and rust damage – I was wondering. Doesn’t inspire a lot of cofidence for maintenance and reliability, especially for longer drives.
Meezly
There’s still a post-pandemic supply-demand issue for companies that deals with fleet cars. Rental car companies aren’t really an option because the rates are still 2-3X higher than pre-pandemic prices. On the one hand, this continues to dissuade many people from touristic road trips but it also impacts the tourism industry that relies on road travellers.
Al
The fact you can pay a bot to book a flex the second it becomes available and Communauto seem fine with that doesn’t help either
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Kate
The Château Champlain and the Hotel Bonaventure have imposed a lockout until Tuesday morning, after unionized workers staged a 24‑hour walkout Sunday.
Ian
Union busting is not a good look. I wonder how many union members book rooms there?
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Kate
A heat wave is upon us with high humidexes expected on and off all week.
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Kate
Even La Presse is not beyond writing a mildly clickbaity headline in the dog days of summer: Des bus électriques jamais utilisés. It’s not the scandal it sounds like, even though they get Aref Salem to huff and puff for a paragraph.
The story? In 2018, the STM was inveigled into buying four mid‑size electric buses from a Chinese supplier, planning to use them on a specific route in Ste‑Anne‑de‑Bellevue. The technical issue isn’t spelled out, but the implication is that battery technology has evolved a lot since 2018 and these buses simply don’t hold up compared to more recent models; the Chinese firm, BYD, may have made exaggerated claims about the vehicle’s range.
Kudos to Philippe Teisceira-Lessard for writing this up when he knows that the only thing most people are looking for in the media right now is Olympic results.
Report on these buses from 2018 in the Journal.
Major Annoyance
Hopefully the STM will deploy them once the western branch of the REM opens? It looks like these buses are small enough to navigate Ste-Anne Village and light enough that McGill might permit running them through their Macdonald campus and over to the l’Anse a l’Orme station. The existing Anciens-Combattants interchange gets seriously congested most weekdays. Mcgill’s private bridge over the 20 and the train tracks seems like the only viable way to hook southern Ste-Anne’s and the campus onto the new train network. We’ll see soon enough…
Kate
As the item says, they may be rented out to small school groups. These buses only hold 38 passengers.
James
The STM also said that the buses are not universally accessible – no wheelchair ramp. So they need other “normal” buses for the route anyway.
This inexpensive experiment (with other types of buses) has allowed the STM to plan for the electrification of their entire fleet (including other transit operators in Quebec).
https://www.stm.info/en/about/major_projects/major-bus-projects/bus-network-electrification
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Kate
Some landlords are blacklisting potential tenants if they have ever gone to the rental board, never mind how justified their complaint. They want people they can bully and manipulate without consequences.
Ian
Being a landlord should require a license.
Ephraim
This isn’t new. I thought it was well known. It’s the same principle as those who pay more for household insurance. Making a claim on insurance makes you more likely to make another claim, and you your insurance rates increase.
dhomas
As a landlord, I do check TAL history of my tenants. I don’t really care if there’s a dossier at the TAL. But if the the potential tenant has had 5 encounters with the TAL in the past 5 years at multiple different addresses, I might think twice. As the saying goes, if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, there’s a good chance you’re the asshole.
Ian
To be fair a tenant can also check if their potential landlord has had complaints against them. I still think that being a landlord should require a license.
bob
So a couple of takeaways:
There are evidently people, like Martin Messier, who think that a complaint against a landlord for a predatory rent hike or fixing a hole in the roof vitiates any right to shelter. Maybe he and Galen Weston Jr. could start a club, and deny people the right to food as well. When someone figures out how to commercialize air, that too.
Corporate landlords have nothing to do with this housing crisis, nope, not at all, and they certainly are not using shady tactics to jack up rents. It’s all these shady tenants who pay 60% of their income to a faceless, tax evading holding company that takes a year to fix a broken toilet, but serves a TAL complaint for non-payment at 12:01am on the 2nd of the month.@Ephraim – The logic does not hold, though. It’s like saying if you get hit by lightning, then you are more likely to be hit by lightning twice, because everyone who has been hit by lightning a second time has been hit by lightning a first time. You did not make yourself get hit by lightning. Assuming you don’t climb steeples in thunderstorms. The real logic is this – the increase is punishment for filing a claim, so that people are less likely to file a claim. A “disincentive”.
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Kate
The Gazette feels here like it’s trying to make a clickbaity news story out of nothing much: Firefighters are losing precious time because of Montreal traffic says the headline. The report? “It takes about 15 seconds longer on average for firefighters to arrive at the scene of a fire”, comparing 2018 to 2023.
But it also feels like someone’s reading the more kvetchy Montreal groups on Facebook, where crotchety people (many of whom may not even live in Montreal) complain endlessly about cones, cones, cones. This story panders perfectly to their sensibilities. “Too much construction right now… the city is to blame for adding too many bicycle paths…” Yes. Bingo achieved. Nice bit of outrage over breakfast.
azrhey
although I 100% agree with your take on Montreal Bashing and am entirely done with it, I have also noticed that in Montreal ( Or Quebec? Canada? I don’t know my experience is mostly Montreal and Laval once in a blue moon… ) drivers don’t seem to get out of way, or do anything possible to get out of the way of firetrucks and ambulances as quickly as I’ve noticed in Europe (sample size of france, spain portugal, uk, YMMV ). I live not far from a fire station and often see firetrucks stuck behind a car stuck at an intersection whereas I would have expected the car to half turn right to liberate the truck but they don’t because they want to go straight ahead, and other things like that. I’ve mentioned it to couple of other european friends over the years and they seem to agree that get out of the way of emergency vehicles is a more quick thing over there…
su
“It’s really the time on the road that has increased over the years,” Lapointe said. “The biggest reason for this is the sheer density of traffic congestion.”
I wonder how many More Cars there are on the streets of Montreal compared to, say, 20 years ago.
carswell
@su Can’t cite chapter and verse (heard it in a CBC Montreal interview with a transportation specialist) but in the multi-decade interval during which the on-island population increased 22%, the number of registered cars on island rose 60%.
walkerp
azrhey, it’s an east coast thing and particularly acute in Montreal. It’s really gross. When you drive in Vancouver, everybody pulls over at the sound of a siren.
jeather
I was driving down Rose-de-Lima when it was down to one lane because of construction, and an ambulance was driving down — people moved out of the way as best they could given traffic, but one car just was on the ambulance’s ass and the ambulance driver actually stopped it, got out of the cab, and yelled at the guy, then got back in the ambulance and just made the red light. It was remarkable — I get the urge but surely that wasn’t the best use of time if they needed a siren?
Uatu
It’s the same mentality in this city that makes people stand in front of the doors of the metro instead of to the side to let passengers off first. I don’t really understand. Are Montrealers that self absorbed? Or just straight up inconsiderate.
MarcG
I’ve always attributed this behavior to a scarcity mindset (“The world has treated me unfairly so I will do the same”) but it’s just my feeling.
SMD
Related headline from today: Bike lanes and narrowed streets don’t slow emergency vehicles. From a multi-year study in Iowa.
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Kate
The city is making efforts to save endangered plants on Mount Royal by blocking off trails that go through their zones. Walkers are meant to stick to official trails, not create new ones through the underbrush.
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