Two of the three flats in the collapsed St‑Henri building were occupied, but no one was home when it fell down. Both parties spoke to Le Devoir about the lack of support they got from public sources.
Updates from September, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
TVA asks Will we always have traffic jams? and, contradicting Kate’s Law that the answer to a headline question is always “no” it seems the answer this time is “yes”.
However, the two experts consulted each propose one idea: that construction sites should be better managed, and that we should spend a lot more on public transit. Neither of those things is going to happen in the short term. But neither expert even seems to remember that we found out during the height of the pandemic that a lot of us can work from home, which keeps vehicles off the road. It’s almost as if mention of the pandemic has become taboo.
steph
Won’t self driving cars solve the traffic problem for us?
Kate
Flying cars, steph.
Andrew
I’m on your side Kate, but we may need to update the Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Chris
steph, in case that’s not sarcasm, the answer is no. Small efficiencies may be gained at first, but induced demand will take it all away. And anyway, self-driving cars don’t make the roads bigger, there’s still only room for so many.
Ramsay
I have also seen the argument made that self driving cars will increase traffic because they will enable today’s drivers to become passengers and so not mind spending the time sitting in traffic since they will just be on their phone or laptop
P
I’m impressed, because that is one of the few times that it is indeed a contradiction to Kate’s Law, possibly the first I’ve seen.
On that note, ever since I learned it, I’ve scrutinized headlines like that. A neat thing.
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Kate
An
AmericanItalian transit expert says the ARTM’s proposed plan for an east‑end tram is too optimistic and too expensive.Nicholas
Marco is an Italian (from the Bologna area, not a Montreal Italian) who’s been a post doc fellow at McGill for a few years, so I’ll let you decide if he’s a Montrealer or not, but he’s not American. (He wears a few hats, working on that project at Marron Institute in NYC with people from Berlin and Turkey). He takes the 55 a lot. Maybe you’ve run into him, Kate, without even knowing!
Kate
My mistake. My eye fell on “Université de New York” and I jumped to a conclusion.
DeWolf
I found it odd that the article didn’t mention that Marco lives in Montreal and studied at UdM. It makes it sound like some foreign expert who is randomly interested in Montreal transit.
Nicholas
Of the transit experts I know of around the world (certainly not everyone), Marco is the only one I know of in Montreal, and he writes about Montreal all the time, and is known not just in the Montreal transportation community but in media and politics (Nie Desrochers from R-C, who’s interviewed him, asks him questions on Twitter every so often, and his threads get lots of attention from lots of local elected officials). I certainly don’t expect everyone to know he’s here, but it is weird that he did a report, in French, for Vivre en Ville, talking about very local stuff, and La Presse doesn’t note he’s a local.
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Kate
Jagmeet Singh has ended the supply‑and‑confidence agreement the NDP made to prop up Justin Trudeau’s minority government.
Tim S.
Granted I’ve chosen a side here, but I hate that framing. The NDP’s goal wasn’t to “prop up” Trudeau, it was to make specific, concrete gains. Others will decide if they achieved that or not, but not everything’s a Trudeau referendum.
Kate
Fair enough, Tim S. But I would submit that the NDP went into the arrangement knowing they had the balance of power and were propping up the Liberals.
Tim S.
Sure – but propping up their opponents, the Liberals, was the cost, not the goal.
Ephraim
@Kate – What choice do we really have anymore? Let’s be realistic, we have had very few majority governments in the last few years. Odds are the next government will again be a minority government of some sort. There are so many people at the extremes that the only realistic government today is actually National Unity and yet… it doesn’t happen. And the problem with that can be seen in many other countries. The majority of our neighbours are very much in the centre and yet they are allowing the extreme right push an agenda that doesn’t suit them. The same is true of Alberta… is there any other place in Canada where Abortion Rights are still a discussion? LGBTQ rights?
dhomas
I’m going to wade into territory that is outside the scope of the blog (i.e. not Montreal content), but I think this affects all Canadians, including Montrealers.
I’m a little disappointed that the NDP allowed themselves to be goaded into this by PP. To me, it smells a bit of desperation on the CPC’s part. I think (hope?) people are starting to see through PP’s soundbite-worthy rhetoric filled with no solutions other than slogans and vitriol towards his opponents. The polls seems to indicate that he’s somewhat losing momentum, compared to earlier this year. The CPC might be worried that their campaign won’t have the stamina to retain that momentum all the way through to a 2025 election, so they want an election now while they have “les conditions gagnantes”.
I think Magali Picard in this interview pretty much summed up my view on PP:
https://cultmtl.com/2024/09/pierre-poilievre-is-a-clown/So, now we go full circle and get back to Montreal and clowns. 😀
Joey
@dhomas you sure? According to 338 (https://338canada.com/polls.htm), the CPC has been steady around 42% – basically their peak – all year. A year ago today they were at 39%. If they hold steady, they’ll easily pass 200 seats.
@ephraim it’s far from a done deal but the overwhelming odds right now are a PP majority government
walkerp
It’s amazing to me how many people are absolutely buying in and reinforcing this narrative that the Cons are somehow going to dominate the next election. The only evidence of this are polls, which have become less and less reliable in the 21st century. And oh yeah, one lost by-election which somehow represents total failure for the Liberals and that Trudeau must step down immediately.
The CBC is the absolute worst, just parroting this narrative as a truth in multiple news articles on any given day. Honestly, it makes me feel that the Cons propaganda strategy of focusing entirely on Trudeau as an individual and making up cute negatives phrases is actually working.I don’t think the NDP caved into PP’s little rhetorical ploy either. I think they saw that the deal was not helping their polling numbers and also were probably genuinely fed up with the Liberals backtracking and undercutting on the deal and probably many other factors and decided it makes sense for them to be able to continue to negotiate with them but on a per-legislation basis rather than this deal. It may give them more leverage, especially as the Liberals try to push more pork out to the people in the coming months.
steph
I’ll believe the narrative and hope we don’t rush into an election any time soon. Despite the current polling numbers, this armchair pundit thinks if we leave PP keep punching air for another 12 months, he’ll lose all his steam and the poll numbers will swing back.
The NDP must think they know something we don’t. They’ll have my vote regardless of the timing, but “lesser of two evils” will keep prevailing in this electoral system that we have.
Kate
CTV is emphasizing how there are no images of Trudeau on campaign posters in the Sud‑Ouest byelection, although rather undermining this with a photo of a Craig Sauvé poster that doesn’t include Jagmeet Singh either.
jeather
I don’t think the NDP wants an election now any more than the Liberals do.
The truth is that the NDP has been incredibly silent about what they’ve done as part of teh agreement, so it looks like everything is due to the Liberals.
Kevin
Whenever I feel the need to argue with someone who is angry at a government, I ask them to list what specific items they are upset about. I then point out how the people they are angry with have absolutely nothing to do with those issues.
Uatu
Sellout Singh – wow so clever, PP. This wannabe Trump trying to make his own lying Hilary meme.
Ian
Well Singh is a sellout, sure, but it’s not li’l P.P. is going to move the dial further left of centre. I’m not sure what his point is.
Joey
I suspect that the NDP is less optimistic about the upcoming by-elections (the Manitoba one should be an easy hold and Craig Sauve is supposed to make waves in LaSalle-Emard-Verdun) and decided to fast-track the eventual project to distance themselves from the Liberals. I do not think they ‘took Poillievre’s bait’ here.
It’s interesting that Singh hasn’t had to explain which aspects of the agreement weren’t met – the deal between the two parties was quite broad with a lot more aspirational rhetoric than policy commitments, and the Liberals can certainly say they’ve made significant progress on many of the priorities (dental care, pharmacare, etc. – even if the programs are, shall we say, somewhat mild in scope, the expected progress has reasonable been made). Which explains, I think, why nobody really thinks an election is actually imminent.
Will Singh and the NDP be able to create distance between themselves and the Liberal Party? Possibly, though that doesn’t help when the two parties are competing for third place and are going to be celebrating mutual achievements in the campaign.
As for PP, there is a lot of wishful thinking going on here. I suppose Trudeau figured that a second Trump presidency would scare Canadians straight. That may still happen, but it’s a lot less likely than a couple of months ago. Maybe the hope for the Liberals now is that a Harris presidency will start a wave of left-of-centre wins globally. I wouldn’t bet on it. The Conservatives have built a huge lead in both polls and money, and they are making inroads in places that are essential to any kind of LPC victory. Moreover, Angus Reid has Trudeau at 67% unfavourable/28% favourable, which I think is a nadir for him. Yes, PP is at a net -12 unfavourable, but he’s got the lead; it’s hard to imagine Canadians adopting dramatically different views of JT at this point in his career. With Trudeau at the helm, the distance between the Liberals floor and ceiling seems pretty small…
Tux
I just wanted to mention that any mention of PP’s “rising popularity” or “good poll numbers” is automatically suspect as he has been using astroturfing firms to post fake positive comments about himself.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-rally-kirkland-conservative-bots-1.7287901
Joey
You got me.
I assure you, I am in no way thrilled that our next PM – likely with a big majority of MPs behind him – is most likely to be PP.
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Kate
Mayor Plante wants 300 photo radar devices to place around town, but Quebec has only bought 250 devices for the entirety of this vast province and it is the provincial transport ministry which will decide where to put them.
Joey
I could see the province deciding to deploy these killjoy devices exclusively in Montreal to piss off our drivers…
Alex L
I think they should be everywhere, and they shouldn’t be advertised in advance. Drivers endangering other people are not above the law and should be fined.
Joey
Meh, they’ll be figured out soon enough and incorporated into Waze, Google Maps, etc., pretty quickly. Anyway, the point isn’t to just penalize drivers blindly (though that has some merit!), it’s to make the city safer. The known presence of photo radar devices will do the vast majority of the work here – there are a few around town and most drivers know to slow down when passing them. What we need to add are more speed cameras and also stop sign/crosswalk cameras.
Tim S.
I also like the idea of putting them in vans that get moved around randomly every day.
Ephraim
Photo Radar doesn’t really do anything except make people slow down suddenly and dangerously when they see the signs. You see it on the highway, they slow to 100 km/h for that one stretch and then back to 120 km/h as soon as it’s over. It’s a tax collecting speed bump.
This is going back to the magical thinking that will solve problems. The police proposed giving prostitutes injunctions to stop them walking on St-Catherine and St-Laurent and spread the prostitution throughout the neighbourhood and further east. So, have we stopped prostitution? If magical thinking solved problems, everyone would be housed. We wouldn’t have drug overdoses and of course no restaurant would ever fail.
What have other cities done? Has it worked? What have we tried? What lessons have we learnt from that? We need to learn from real traffic calming techniques for school zones, not just handing out random fines in hopes that it will actually solve the problem. Because inevitably, it will just create different problems, elsewhere. Oh and you know who NOT to ask what to do… the police. Because they aren’t experts in this. You know who to ask… city planners. Who might come up with some ideas, like one-way streets, limited turns, pedestrian streets with bollards during certain hours, etc.
mare
The van idea is nice, but because cars don’t have front plates and there needs to be proof that the owner of the car is driving, setting up a camera isn’t that easy. You need to take synchronized photos of the front (driver) and back (license plate) of the car.
And I think there needs to be warning signs everywhere because of some lawsuit in the past. Using empty vans (hundreds of them) and just parking them and putting up those warning signs would be much cheaper and easier imho.I like the situation in Europe where almost every traffic light is equipped with a red light camera *and* a speed camera. It’s costly for drivers, but I learned to obey the speed limit pretty quickly. And the excuse of all speeders, ‘I’m not speeding, I drive with the flow of traffic’ doesn’t work anymore. Driving 53 in a 50 km/h zone is $$. Driving 70 is $$$.
Ian
Laws only work when enforced. I woudl love to see way more traffic cams, at least at every chokepoint which is where people tend to drive more aggressively. The big difference between this and the magical thinking of legislation is that traffic flow actually does follow specific patterns, especially in the city.
“You know who to ask… city planners. Who might come up with some ideas, like one-way streets, limited turns, pedestrian streets with bollards during certain hours, etc.”
Yeah well our brain trusts in power don’t think they need to do planning studies. Rabouin and his gang of fanbois were openly ridiculing people on the socials for saying there should be traffic flow studies done before rerouting city buses for street closures to accomodate elderly and mobility impaired local residents. Apparently momentum is more important than direction for this bunch. Ferrandez was the master of randomly changing street directions to slow traffic, and his preferred mode of transportation seems to be the huff he walked out in. PM are a bunch of elitists that tend to imagine everyone lives within bicycling and walking distance of everythign they need to do each day and simply choose not to walk or bicycle. As I recall Norris once said if you need to commute to work maybe you shouldn’t be living downtown. Must be nice to be so cocooned you can’t even imagine you’re not being an asshole by saying things like that.
Kevin
Photo radar doesn’t do anything useful.
Red light cameras and eliminating gridlock, that’s where our money should go.And you never know when your commute will be drastically altered because a broken water main destroys your workplace…
Ephraim
@Ian – We REALLY need city planners. And I don’t mean the guys with degrees from 20 years ago. We need a lot of younger city planners (New Urbanism, things like https://www.humankind.city/ for example) who can look at it from the standpoint of making it a better city, rather than make cars run smoother. If that means that we have to actually BAN cars from the street in front of schools in the morning and make parents drop their kids off on the school side of the street down the block, so be it. People who drop off kids tend to wait to see their kids walk into the building, which just further complicates things.
Lambert Closse is a good example of a school next to two major arteries. Maybe they should force entry/exit from the school to be via Waverly and not let the students near St-Urbain at all. And in the case of Bernard, consider retractable bollards between St-Urbain and Waverly during the morning and evening rush, so that traffic can’t use Bernard to enter St-Urbain or get off of St-Urbain at that point. But then, I’m not an Urban Planner.
I mean, even with some of the best of intents, the city makes some incredible mistakes and technology can solve. The turns on Sherbrooke to get to the Jacques Cartier (at Papineau) is a fantastic example. Westbound (ie going downtown) there is one lane forward and 2 turning lanes. And yet on the opposite side there are 2 receiving lanes…. for 1 lane going forward. You could shift a lane and add it to Papineau going Eastbound and allow 2 turning lanes onto Papineau South. And on the receiving end of Sherbrooke going Eastbound, you could delete one lane going forward (as you have 2 receiving lanes) and shift the two turning lanes over by one lane and in the space between the 2 turnings lanes and one forward lane, you could put a small median, so people are forced to turn and choose the right lane. It’s like it was designed by an idiot to ensure that nothing works and everyone can make an error. Make it foolproof and the fools will have to take the turn and double back, but won’t do it a second time. And mark it properly so that people quickly get the point that if they don’t pay attention they are going to be off-track and well, stop looking at their phones instead of driving fully aware!
Ian
My kid went to LC, they were only allowed to leave by the Waverly exit unless accompanied by an adult.
That said, flow planning is a mishmash at best chez nous. Even our pedestrian crossings are inconsistent block to block, for no apparent reason.
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Kate
According to the Albany Times Union, Amtrak service from Montreal to New York will resume this week following months of track repairs on the Canadian side of the border.
Blork
I’ll bet it’s not going to be any faster.
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Kate
CTV says that an anonymous donor has offered to match all donations this month at the SPCA, although the official site clarifies that donations will be matched for a year if you make a commitment this month. The organization is coping with a rising number of abandoned animals.
Paul
Great news for SPCA Montreal!
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Kate
Cops are seeking a man who abandoned his car on the Galipeault bridge west of Montreal Tuesday night. Weapons, a dog and army uniforms were found in the vehicle when he fled as police tried to aid him when he ran out of gas. He’s not wanted for any crime (just yet).
walkerp
He left his dog?! And he ran out of gas?! We are not dealing with an ex-special forces op on the run here, I suspect.
Kate
Yes, but guys with guns and falsely assumed uniforms have caused havoc in the past, so it’s fortunate that he screwed up.
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