Plante begs Quebec for photo radar
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 13:36 on 2024-09-04 Permalink
I could see the province deciding to deploy these killjoy devices exclusively in Montreal to piss off our drivers…
Alex L 14:09 on 2024-09-04 Permalink
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 15:33 on 2024-09-04 Permalink
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. 18:00 on 2024-09-04 Permalink
I also like the idea of putting them in vans that get moved around randomly every day.
Ephraim 22:26 on 2024-09-04 Permalink
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 22:33 on 2024-09-04 Permalink
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 07:00 on 2024-09-05 Permalink
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 10:35 on 2024-09-05 Permalink
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 12:08 on 2024-09-05 Permalink
@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 20:33 on 2024-09-05 Permalink
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.