Montreal City Weblog

Kate 11:35 on 2025-03-12 Permalink Reply  

• Joey 13:02 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  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 14:27 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  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 14:52 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  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 15:00 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  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 16:03 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  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 16:56 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  Oh lordy not this again.
  Plante is just being stubborn.

• Tim S. 17:30 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  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 17:37 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  @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 17:45 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  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 18:09 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  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 18:42 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  Why is so hard to find hi-res graphics of the plan?

• MarcG 18:52 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  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 19:02 on 2025-03-12 Permalink

  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 09:15 on 2025-03-13 Permalink

  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 09:40 on 2025-03-13 Permalink

  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 11:39 on 2025-03-13 Permalink

  Is it a major thoroughfare or a two-lane road with a speed limit as low as 20 km/h?

• saintlaurent 12:28 on 2025-03-13 Permalink

  > 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 12:39 on 2025-03-13 Permalink

  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 14:31 on 2025-03-13 Permalink

  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 19:08 on 2025-03-13 Permalink

  @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 12:07 on 2025-03-15 Permalink

  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.