A downtown demonstration in favour of withdrawing Canada from NATO and in support of Palestine heated up Friday evening accompanied by tear gas and several arrests. TVA got some photos.
Update: Justin Trudeau and other politicians have condemned the protest – BBC radio even reported on the PM’s condemnation although it also reported that the SPVM didn’t find any antisemitic actions were made.
Also, police promise that more arrests will be made.
There are calls to widen the narrow, tricky bike path, on the Jacques‑Cartier bridge, but it won’t be done anytime soon.
I could be mistaken, Blork, but isn’t St. Helen’s Island only accessible from the west side of the bridge?
No, if you’re on foot on the east side path, you open a door, go downstairs and walk across the river in a structure underneath the bridge, go upstairs, open an door, and you’re on the west side.
There is a technically easy, cheap solution that would anger a lot of people: turn one car lane (probably west side) into a two-way bike lane (which would be wide enough for both directions and easy passing), and then make the current sections on each side pedestrian-only. Especially with rush hour traffic down since the pandemic, having two car lanes each way at all times will probably work out fine once the Lafontaine tunnel is done. As with most street issues, how we allocate our public space is a very politically fraught question, but is technically simple. Just because the status quo is like this doesn’t mean it should continue to be.
Well said, Nicholas.
La Presse has a two-part interview with Mayor Plante on Friday, as she restates her philosophy of giving the city back to the people who live in it, and tackling the issue of homelessness.
Weekend notes from CityCrunch, La Presse, CultMTL.
Notes on weekend road warnings.
I still haven’t heard back from Cult about the weird SEO garbage pumped out on their backend RSS feed.
https://nicknicknicknick.net/notes/2024/09/09/cult-mtl.html
Nick, it’s strange I don’t even see an available RSS feed for the CultMTL category pages. As for a suggestions of a decent tool, I use The Old Reader.
That rules, Marc, thanks for the ref!
As for the CultMTL feed, all I’m using is http://cultmontreal.com/feed/, not category-specific.
Pretty weird. Those posts do appear on the category pages e.g. https://cultmtl.com/category/guides/page/2/. I would guess either some attempt at SEO, paid content, or a site hack they’re unaware of.
Yeah, whatever it is it’s… not great
CBC’s Antoni Nerestant has a clear summary of the Haroun Bouazza racism charge and its fallout, which I’d passed over for the blog initially, but which I think has to be noticed. Toula Drimonis also writes about the incident on CultMTL and what it reveals about Quebec’s feelings about its unexamined attitudes.
I absolutely agree that it’s difficult to talk about racism. My friend’s brother (black) has 2 cars but he only uses the old one otherwise he is stopped by police almost every week. However, why do you say in Quebec !? It’s everywhere! That’s typical of CBC…
Because this is about a provincial politician, talking about provincial politics, in the provincial Assembly, being chastised by other provincial politicians and local journalists, not about racism in general.
I appreciate that she called out the hypocrisy of Jolin-Barette calling someone else “divisive”.
As Patrick Déry points out in Le Devoir today, Haroun wasn’t wrong.
Drimonis’s writing has improved. I read an article of hers a few years ago and found it amateurish so I stopped clicking those links but decided to give her another chance and am glad I did.
Typical how these nationalists can’t take a little justified criticism and run immediately to “apologize and shut up” – straight out of the abuser playbook.
Don’t forget the “he insults all Quebecers” old chestnut. Any contrary opinion is automatically “Quebec bashing”.
They already widened it once, in the mid-1990s I believe. Before then the paths on both sides of the bridge were the same width and were designed only with pedestrians in mind, not bicycles. Here’s a photo from 1990 taken on the east side path. You can see how scary narrow it is, given that cycle traffic moved in both directions. At the time the west side path was just as narrow. https://flic.kr/p/SE7mex
It would be a huge task to widen it again. In the meantime there are definitely things they could do to improve safety. For example, replace the metal chicanes with something flexible that won’t cause injury if you hit one. And illuminate them at night!
There are also some places along the path where bits and bobs protrude a bit into the path from the structure on the side facing car traffic. Surely those can be dealt with easily.
It would also help if it were made VERY VERY CLEAR that pedestrians should use the path on the east side and bicycles on the west side. Mixing pedestrians and bicycles on a narrow enclosed path where the bicycles frequently get up to 30 or 40 kph is a recipe for disaster. Especially given that most of the pedestrians (in my experience) have no idea how to walk on a mixed use path (hint; walk facing oncoming traffic, not with oncoming traffic at your back). If I had a dollar for every pedestrian I saw on that path who was SURPRISED that a bicycle came up behind them…
And finally — and I know this is hopeless — encourage cyclists to not ride like maniacs on the path. Most don’t but plenty do. You regularly see grinning MAMILs practically breaking the speed of sound on the downhills as they get their lighter-than-air racing bicycles going at top speed. Or worse, people on 100kg electric cargo bikes racing down the hills at full power. Both are dangerous and both should be discouraged.