Vincent Marissal, whose name came up as a possible mayoral candidate for the new party Transition Montreal to face Projet in November, says he’s not going there. It’s clear he understands the many problems facing the city, but “on ne s’improvise pas maire de Montréal.”
Updates from March, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Valérie Plante maintains that Projet is on the right side of history in planning to ban motor vehicles from the Camillien‑Houde.
More images and explanations of the planned changes.
Joey
Regardless of how you feel about this decision (and we’ve discussed it to death here), you have to admit it’s refreshing for a political party to propose a bold, expensive and probably unpopular initiative months away from an election.
Andrew
I don’t know how you can acknowledge it’s been discussed to death and then call it a bold initiative. It’s the conclusion of a six year saga, we’ve already had an election since it was proposed.
The impressive part is they said it would take six years to decide, and six years is what it took.
https://mtlcityweblog.com/2019/11/29/camillien-houde-city-to-take-its-time/
Joey
LOL that article says the city promised the work would be done by 2025, not that they would need six more years to decide. Interesting to see the $90M price tag hasn’t changed despite huge inflation since 2019.
walkerp
I appreciate your point, Joey, but I do wonder how bold and unpopular it actually is. There is so much noise and amplification around so many issues today and especially car stuff, that it is hard to know what the actual preference of the population is. I suspect that PM may have their own data that is telling them this is actually a fairly safe and popular move.
walkerp
And now that I have actually looked at the plan, this is going to be a huge improvement. Just the part where avenue Mont-Royal meets Camilien-Houde and Cote St-Catherine makes me think of how much better the Pine-Parc interchange is now.
Ian
Oh lordy not this again.
Plante is just being stubborn.Tim S.
This is will reduce access to the mountain for anyone not from the Plateau. The parking lots at the top are full on weekends, summer and winter, often with families carrying a fair amount of gear. While in many other aspects of life I’m fairly anti-car, for those of us who don’t live within a few blocks of Jeanne Mance, car is currently the only feasible way to get up there. So, count me at least as one of the people furious about this.
Anyways, I’m now coming to see why some commentators here have a thing about Alex Norris.
Joey
@walkerp I don’t see why that intersection can’t be improved without eliminating car traffic on Camillien Houde. I don’t know why that isn’t phase one, given that there was already a fatality at that intersection. As for public opinion, go back and look at the OPCM report. It’s sad, I think, that Projet is abandoning the first recommendation, pretending otherwise, and gaslighting those who call out their BS. We’re supposed to expect better from Projet, no?
Also too – think of what you could do for pedestrian safety with $90M…
Blork
Just when I thought I was out, you pulled me back in.
Let’s not forget old folks and families going to the cemetery. I think there are other ways in, but the main entrance is on CH, AFAIK. Forcing people to circumnavigate the entire mountain to get up there brings more car traffic to Côte-St-Catherine and Pine.
I could get behind this idea if it were for some great thing like the REV or some other highly used and highly useful thing. But what is this for? So a handful of lycra-wearing cyclists who are fit enough to climb CH can do so without being bothered by cars? Is that it?
When I think about this issue I try to filter out the rants and raves of (a) people who simply object to anything that restricts cars or parking, no matter what, and (b) people who simply hate all things “car” no matter what.
With those filters applied, I have seen a number of compelling arguments against this move, and I haven’t seen any in favour of it. (“Pedestrian safety” isn’t really an issue, as pedestrians have multiple ways to get up the mountain on various car-free roads and paths already. Comparisons with other parks that are allegedly “car free” — notably ones in New York — are spurious because none of those parks are actually car-free. And besides, the park is already car-free because CH does not go through the park, it goes along the edge of the park. The mountain is not the park.)
So what am I missing? What are the truthful, actual, useful reasons for doing this?
Ian
Maybe Plante has decided that now that she dioesn’t have to face the music she is happy to give Norris enough rope to hang himself with. He has certainly given her many reasons to be annoyed with him over the years, it’s almost funny sering him allowed to make statements to newspapers again. Maybe giving Rabouon a taste of what he’s in for when the “silent majority” reacts to the condescending, paternalistic tone of the last of the old guatd.
MarcG
Why is so hard to find hi-res graphics of the plan?
MarcG
The press release says “D’autres analyses portent sur les options de dessertes innovantes sur Camillien-Houde, telles que des minibus adaptés à toutes les clientèles.” How is that not a core element of the plan?
Joey
All of this started after a cyclist was tragically killed by a driver doing an illegal u-turn. Making u-turns impossible is easy – the city has already experimented with concrete medians and bollards. They’ve created weekly cyclovias to allow the MAMELs to have free rein. They’ve tried a bunch of different traffic configurations and none of them have improved anything.
Meanwhile, we’ve had several pedestrian and cyclist deaths in Parc Ave, from the monument up to almost Van Horne, and not a thing has changed – no rearranged intersections, no additional protected light cycles, no improved traffic enforcement. Just the occasional admonishing lecture to the Hasidic community for having the audacity to allow their kids to walk around in the evening.
Instead we got a “grand” new entrance on the Remembrance side, which is about as generic an arrangement as you could imagine.
Government is about choices. The choices made here stink.
PS: also, Blork, to your point neither Central Park nor prospect Park are big hills.
PPS: Icing on the cake – after SIX YEARS of study, there’s still no plan for public transit.
saintlaurent
Would it be possible/feasible/desirable to allow cars coming from the Plateau to get to the parking lots and cemetery entrance, but once there they could not exit towards Côte-des-Neiges? And the reverse, also true; i.e.; cars coming from CDN could get to the parking lots and cemetery, but by using barriers and a reconfigured geometry of the parking lots, not be permitted to exit towards the Plateau?
This would require reconfiguring the parking lots, obviously, but if this were possible, it would eliminate all cars using CH as a convenient shortcut, but preserve public access to the park from both sides. And if you could also somehow permit STM buses to pass through from both directions, well, so much the better.
And this idea would obviously have a measurable impact on other east-west roads like Doctor-Penfield and Côte-Ste-Catherine. But if you begin from the premise that having a major thoroughfare cut through the city’s most prominent park is a bad thing, then what is the least restrictive solution that solves the problem but preserves other, desirable public goods (e.g., park and cemetery access)?
CE
I’m surprised that this isn’t still being put off until after the election but Projet must have come to the conclusion that it’s something they can run on. I have some issues with the plan but overall I’m in favour of it. I can imagine 15-20 years from now, if you were to ask a young person to imagine a major thoroughfare running from one side of the mountain to the another, they would you were nuts (the same way we look at plans from the 1950s to put roads all over the mountain as insane).
Joey
Is it a major thoroughfare or a two-lane road with a speed limit as low as 20 km/h?
saintlaurent
> Is it a major thoroughfare
What’s the AADT on CH? I mean, sure, it’s not the Met. And I don’t care what the nominal speed limit is, if the majority of drivers think they can get away with going 50 kph, then they’re going to go 50 kph. This is, of course, partly a function of the roadway design, but Montreal drivers aren’t exactly world-renowned for being sticklers for the posted limit.
I think for someone to argue that CH *isn’t* viewed by most people who drive their car over it as the quickest and easiest path between CDN and the Plateau, is being pretty fatuous.
walkerp
Turn fields of concrete into more park and joining two sides of a mountain back together to make a much bigger and nice park is a no-brainer improvement. In 10 years, everybody will wonder how insane it was to have a road through the middle of it.
bob
The important thing is that the good people who supply traffic cones need to be well taken care of. That has obviously been a priority, and Plante et al. have been highly successful at making sure the city has more traffic cones than trees. We can only hope for the sake of the starving managers of our illustrious and efficient engineering and construction firms that this $90 million price tag will swell into at least a billion.
Ian
@walkerp join two sides of the mountain? The road goes along the edge iof the existing park. Unless you dig up the cemeteries or cote ste Catherine & upper Westmount nothing will be “rejoined”.
Orr
An A+++ initiative to take back our park from cars and build a new grand entrance to Parc Mont Royal from avenue Mont Royal.
For the record, Mont Royal cemetery loses zero entrances or access from either side.
I’d like to see a free bus/shuttle going up where cam houde was tho. Ride the shuttle up and and then walk down would be fabulous.
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Kate
Northvolt, which was supposed to build a battery plant in the Montérégie, has declared bankruptcy in Sweden. Quebec and Ottawa were so keen to bring this business here – didn’t anyone do the due diligence of examining the firm’s books? How much public money will be washed down this drain (“Le dossier a des allures de fiasco pour les contribuables”)?
Jim
The investment wasn’t necessarily foolish, but it was a high-stakes gamble with some questionable risk management. If Quebec ignored red flags, it was naïve. If they understood the risks but saw it as worth the potential reward, it was a calculated risk that just didn’t pay off.
Kate
I tend to suspect it was why Pierre Fitzgibbon exited so quickly from political life, but perhaps in time we will find out what happened.
Mark
Yeah something stinks here. I get that there is risk involved in this venture, because the battery/energy storage/EV market is evolving rapidly, so there was always a chance that we would invest in something that would flop or be less successful on the market. Like it’s the late 70s and we bet on Betamax instead of VHS.
But that’s not what’s happening here. We put all our money into a company that went bankrupt less than 2 years after we chose to invest in them. Where did our subsidies go? CEO payouts, loan interest, etc.
There are some pretty well established names in this list below that I feel would have been better. Unless Northvolt was promising something that these companies could not deliver on, but then, maybe that’s why they went belly-up, smoke and mirrors?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Battery_manufacturers
Ian
Oh it’s ok, the CAQ sill make the money back nickel and diming health and education /s
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Kate
Allison Hanes fulminates against the CAQ’s witch hunt against religion at a time when more urgent matters should concern them.
At the same time, and defying the apparent need to force immigrants to immediately adopt Québécois language and opinions, newcomers have passed their tests des valeurs with nearly perfect marks. Now, people with any wits about them would have learned to parrot the correct opinions – yes, Quebec is a francophone society, yes, Quebec is democratic and secular, yes, ladies are equal. Nonetheless, pressure for more attitude testing (bill 84) continues.
jeather
It is not a witch hunt against religion, it is a witch hunt against non-Christian religions.
“And it’s setting up an online site to gather tips so the public can alert the investigators to perceived violations of Bill 21”
I’m sure they’ll ignore it but I’m happy to name all the schools.“But trying to scrub every sign of faith from the public realm at the expense of individual rights is overkill. ”
Again, they are not trying to do this, and I wish journalists would not pretend they are.Meezly
Agree. I thought it was bad journalism not specifying that the CAQ has a particular obsession with Islamic religion.
This morning, a pair of ladies have been going door-to-door offering free bible study courses. I returned their card, politely saying no thanks, I’m an atheist. It would be nice if this type of religious soliciting would be banned. But I can bet on my heathen soul that if Muslims were going door-to-door offering free Koran courses, the CAQ would waste no time banning this!
Kate
Can you imagine!
Ian
I actually did trade some door-to-door Mormons a copy of their book for a Bhagavad-Gita i was given by a dude in the metro once, never saw them again. I hope they spread the word of Krishna Consciousness.
Chris
>It would be nice if this type of religious soliciting would be banned.
Really? Perhaps my memory is mixing up commentators here, but this seems at odds with your previously stated opinions on this whole religion/secularism topic.
Kate
jeather, you’re right. Do they recognize their hypocrisy in banning “religion” when what they’re really trying to do is put non‑Catholic religious practice out of sight? I don’t know. I don’t even know whether they know.
Chris, I don’t like doorstep religion, but I don’t see how to fairly frame a ban. What I did make a complaint about was religious proselytizing in Jean‑Talon metro, awhile back. That station has a lot of narrow tunnels and you can feel trapped if someone’s accosting you with tracts in a space like that, or pestering you when you’re just trying to find your way and get through the turnstile. And it did stop.
Ian, that sounds effective! I knew a guy who claimed he would simply answer the door naked. He was a fat hairy guy, too – if true, it must have been a sight the Watchtower hadn’t prepared them for.
Meezly
Chris, it’s nice to see you remember some of the comments I made so I will take the time to explain. I believe in the freedom to practice one’s religion without stigma but draw the line at imposing one’s religious beliefs on others. Prayer in public spaces is fine as that’s their right and public spaces belong to everyone equally as long as no one’s abusing that space, but I draw a line at door-to-door soliciting. I was also attempting to poke fun at the CAQ since they’re always geting their panties in a knot over anything Islam, and meanwhile, bible-thumpers can disturb me at my private residence with impunity!
Joey
Funny, I was just reading a thread on Bluesky about this yesterday. The author was explaining that churches use door-to-door proselytizing not because they think people will covert on the spot (or even eventually), but to solidify the indoctrination of their members. You send young people out into the world to spread the good news, they encounter non-stop rejection and return to the church alienated, fearful and mistrusting of the outside world. All that’s left for them is the church. Brainwashing complete.
Meezly
These were two old ladies and I was very polite with them. But that’s interesting, I can see how churches would use this tactic to strengthen cult-like behaviour. All the more reason to not have them disturb the sanctity of my home just to cement their world views!
Kate
Joey, that’s a good insight. Thanks.
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Kate
La Presse talks to one of the cleaners at Bonaventure, who says in some ways his job has become more like being a hospital orderly – but he still argues against public toilets in the metro, since the one experiment – at Snowdon station – led to homeless people squatting inside.
Uatu
One morning coming into work I saw someone camped out in the elevator leading to the platform at Vendome train station. The homeless will find a way to camp anywhere it seems
Ian
Any port in a storm.
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