A teenager died Tuesday afternoon in the Plateau as an STM bus made a turn near Sherbrooke metro.
Updates from October, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
The first homicide of 2022 was teenager Amir Benayad’s shooting death in the Plateau on January 13. Two people pleaded guilty this week, but their names aren’t reported because they too were minors at the time.
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Kate
The chief coroner has ordered a public inquiry into the fire last week that killed two people. Gehane Kamel will be leading the inquiry, possibly combining it with the inquiry into the March 2023 fire in the same neighbourhood in a building belonging to the same man.
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Kate
La Presse’s Daniel Renaud went out for an evening with the SPVM’s anti‑gang Eclipse squad. Squad spokesman says crime has changed completely since the pandemic, with much younger people involved and the old gang structures and codes no longer holding true.
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Kate
Traffic hell is reported by TVA, talking to a woman who took ten minutes to travel 300 metres. A traffic announcer claims that it’s construction sites, not the increased number of vehicles in town, that are the problem.
I recently spotted some figures showing how the number of motor vehicles on the island had grown much faster than the population, but can’t find them now.
Nobody wants to acknowledge that there are too many vehicles on the island. The impact of so many vehicles on the narrow streets in the older parts of town is hardly ever mentioned.
jeather
When the Guy exit was closed last year (it’s closed again this year but the problem didn’t recur, perhaps because of the weirdness with St Jacques and St Antoine) that’s about the backup you would get on the Atwater exit.
Note that despite the extra traffic doubling the transit time, it was still significantly faster than public transit was — because I had a bus route that was overfull and got stuck in traffic but was a bit too long to walk.
yasymbologist
that’s why the fully autonomous vehicles are so coveted — you can otherwisely enjoy the ten minutes at 1.8km/h simply by watching a few funny video clips without infracting any traffic laws. Or there’ll be 20 minutes in the autopiloting future, to be optimistic, considering how fast the situation aggravates.
James
Only one solution possible : “Autoroute Berri”
(just joking)…
Ian
It feels like Ste Antoine / st jacques around Atwater has been under extensiveconstruction and reconfiguration since the VME got rebuilt. I was walking around down there last weekend and now Ste Antoine west of Atwater is running counter and St J is blocked off. Like srsly wtf, cars or not I’m glad I don’t live there! I briefly lived across from Cafe Joe…. I feel sorry for the people there, for real.
jeather
I live nearly across from Cafe Joe, thanks.
St Jacques has reopened, it was closed for just a week, but it remains very difficult to get anywhere.
Ian
So is it just my imagination that St J has been under constrcution from Rose de Lima to Atwater for at least 5 years steady now?
Van Horne by thte Outremont metro has been under construction for about that long too but it’s only a couple of blocks that are (usually) affected.
It just seems like there are some parts of town that are being worked on basically forever with no real end in sight while private industry somehow builds a megaturd like Royalmount in the space of a year.
jeather
No, both St A and St J have, with a predicted end I think in 2026, though who knows what they plan to start in 2027. St A was longer because there’s a water main under it.
DeWolf
More like two years, and it was St-Antoine, not St-Jacques. The street was completely rebuilt between Atwater and Rose de Lima from 2022 to 2023, with some work spilling into the early part of this year. Now the second phase of the same project is underway further west.
Rose de Lima has been undergoing the same kind of total rebuild for the past year but its nearly finished now.
Royalmount was under construction from 2021 to 2024 (a year longer than scheduled) and it’s just a big box on an empty field. Rebuilding an entire street that people are living on, while maintaining at least pedestrian access if not limited car access, is a lot more complex.
Joey
You know the old saying about how, in a design/engineering project, you can only choose two of the following three: fast, cheap and good. In Montreal we get slow, expensive and bad, almost exclusively. I don’t know if it’s because our political culture is corrupt, our construction industry is corrupt, our construction industry is crappy, our procurement rules require us to select local (i.e., crappy) outfits, or our contract penalty system isn’t strong enough to prevent work from being done badly, but the end result is the same. From design to coordination to execution to completion, it feels like every single public work project in this city can strive for nothing more than mediocre. I understand that the scope of our deferred maintenance is ridiculous. But it feels like the works completed right now are due to be re-done, at least in part, imminently.
jeather
St-Antoine has been under intermittent but significant, long repairs for longer than 2 years, though this particular project is planned to be 2022-26, yes, St-Jacques has had major repairs before this year when this new one started, Rose-de-Lima is still closed between St-A and St-J, though I believe it will reopen this month. I’m not really against the overall repairs of the streets, which needed it, and I’m pleased about the bike lanes, but it’s not “just” 5 years, because you can’t separate this project from all the earlier ones which closed the streets even if they were parts of different repair works.
Ian
Exactly. The project of rebuilding the Outremont metro has also had several stages, for a few weeks a year ago the hoardings even came down… but then went up again and haven’t come down since. It’s still the same construction site from the pedestrian view.
DeWolf
Right, except road construction phases are literally in different places. St-Antoine between Atwater and Rose-de-Lima was inaccessible except by foot a year ago, now it’s fully accessible. Really not the same thing as the Outremont metro project which has been one place under construction for a very long time.
Ian
When I was there Saturday Ste Antoine was running in the reverse direction, it’s not like it’s immune from surrounding projects. Anyway, you don’t have to take my word for it, jeather lives there.
I recognize that the Outremont metro is a different kind of project, I did not mean to suggest that it is the same thing, but to give an example of diffent kinds of projects with similar attributes in terms of project sequence, & by extrapolation, how people in the vicinity’s perceptions may be shaped. I apologize for the lack of clarity.
jeather
You’re so right, apparently “it remains very difficult to get anywhere” is untrue because the specific streets that are blocked off or changed are a block apart.
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Kate
Plateau borough has changed some noise rules while waiting for the city’s planned nightlife policy.
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