A group of older people living in a residence in Rosemont undertook to create a garden on some waste land behind their building. It’s now called the Jardins d’Iberville, has gained support by the borough and certification from Espace pour la vie.
I can’t quite make out where the gardens are located.
Ted Rutland’s Rover article on Paul St‑Pierre Plamondon’s recent evocation of ethnic criminality is today’s must‑read. (Also available in French.)
Whether I like it or not, I’m hoping the PQ wins Monday’s byelection in Arthabaska, because I don’t want to see Éric Duhaime’s Quebec Conservative party get a foot in the door and I don’t want to see the CAQ endorsed. But I’m glad I don’t have to vote in that one.
At 10 pm, Radio-Canada is calling it for the PQ.
Give kids something to do or they turn to crime. My dad was telling this to council members in his hometown in the 1950s.
Anyone who thinks crime is due to a particular ethnic background is a dunce who should be shunned.
Well, we understand that the kind of crime we’re referring to (not, for instance, white collar crime, time theft or other crimes ‘committed’ by businesses, etc) is correlated with poverty, and that poverty, in turn, is correlated with race. And of course that there is not equal enforcement against everyone.
I’m really interested this study: “Youth in general engaged in delinquent acts, he found, because they faced challenges at home or at school, and many of these challenges were shaped by social conditions like poverty, racial discrimination, and the experience of immigration. The delinquency of ethnic youth, then, was often shaped by the particular conditions of their ethnic group, but these conditions did not produce more delinquency.” and would love to see at least references to work that is not 40 years old that confirms this is still true — not three names with no links to the relevant information.
Well, there are Haitian gangs, more or less. And the more or less Haitian gangs work for whom? Are they the ones importing the coke? Are they the cops and lawyers and judges being paid off with coke money? Are they the realtors and bankers and finance bros who launder the coke money? What about the other drug money, or the extortion money, or the million and one scams that scammers pay to keep off the radar?
Of course, I exclude traffic cone rentals from this, as every single traffic cone on the streets of Montreal is absolutely necessary for public safety and the people who rent them are truly deserving of the highest accolades for saving the lives of our children and elderly.
PSPP and his party are just old fashioned racist pols kissing the asses of small, nasty people.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” – LBJ
A note from your local cicadas:
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzz….
I like the sound of cicadas.
Sounds like summer
Wonderful! Spring peepers are good too.
Soraya Martinez Ferrada is promising, if elected, to review the city’s bike path system. Who can doubt that she’s saying this to gain votes from people who hope she will stamp them out, although without making a promise to do so?
Just the worst. Anyway, there should be a rule that you can’t report the number of cyclists using a particular bike lane without the corresponding number of cars that used the adjacent roadway.
More vague posturing. It’s like she’s trying to channel Denis Coderre but without any sort of charisma.
Also, since a lot of people seem completely unaware of this: bike paths in Montreal aren’t just drawn up randomly on the whims of politicians. Each one is approved by the engineers and planners in the SUM. So what Martinez is proposing is for the SUM to run an audit on the work already done by the SUM.
Unless she is planning to hire some outside consultant to review all the bike paths. Doug Ford maybe?
Engineering plans aren’t required for bike paths.
Source, Ian?
Well, you can’t provide sources for things that don’t exist, DeWolf.
When they put in the new bike paths in the Point a few years back, my friend, an avid cyclist, was fairly certain (after she got hit by a car) that the new paths were even less safe than the old system with fewer paths as they changed traffic flow in such a way that it brought bikes and cars into more conflict. She asked to see the traffic flow studies – I imagine this is the type of transportation engineering you mean – and was told there weren’t any.
Similarly, when I asked Luc Rabouin if there had been any mobility studies before pedestrianizing Mont-Royal (I was concerend about hte removal of bus lines) he openly mocked me, saying that PM wasn’t going to waste their time studying something they already “knew” woud have positive outcomes.
I do not think that drawing the conclusion that they do not use engineering plans for bike paths is hasty or unreasonable given this evidence.
It’s worth noting that vélo-Québec has their own training and guidelines for “bikeway planning” (Technical Handbook of Bikeway Design) that they refer to extensively in their advocacy. Nowhere does it suggest the necessity for transportation engineering’s involvement such as formal traffic flow studies.
I would go so far to say that not having transportation engineers involved with this level of planning is one of the reasons that we have, for instance, such inconsistent pedestrian crossings throughout the Plateau. Take Parc, for instance – Van Horne, Bernard, Saint Viateur and Fairmount are all completely different light and turning setups. There is a centre lane that swtiches depending on time of day. Parking and schoolbus stops are allowed. There are no bike paths at all, or protected turns crossing Parc even though the east-west streets have a lot of bike traffic. All of these factors combined makes bicycling even more dangerous. PM has been in power in Mile End for a long time, too, so even saying “these things take time” doesn’t hold up. There has been time.
Every time the city gets involved in response to accidents in Mile End it is on an intersection-by-intersection basis, like the bollards at Hutchison and Saint-Joseph that actually decrease bicyclist visibility, for instance. Even the Jeanne-Mance bike path had to be redone because the bi-directional path was causing issues like kids getting run down by cyclists and that the southbound bike lane wasn’t visible from the driver’s side of a parked car. Reactive roadworks are not a substitute for planning.
I’m pretty sure the city does use engineering firms (who likely have engineering plans) to develop and design cycling infrastructure.
Sources:
https://www.cima.ca/en/project/reseau-express-velo-express-bicycle-network/
https://www.exp.com/experience/peel-street-geometric-redevelopment/
https://www.arup.com/en-us/projects/samuel-de-champlain-bridge-corridor/
https://www.copenhagenize.eu/projects/montral-site-outremont-district-bicycle-plan
These were the easiest to find, but you can probably find more. That said, these seem to be mostly for large-scale projects, not for “regular” roadway-sharing cycling infrastructure, so Ian might have a point. I too have noticed inconsistencies in cycling infrastructure strategy across the island.
East-west bike paths are tricky crossing Parc because Outremont has to be on board, or else the bike path dies at Hutchison. Of course you left out the bike path on Laurier that connects to the St.-Denis REV, the Clark bike path, the forthcoming St-Urbain bike path and the Cote-Ste-Catherine bike path. For now at least, even Projet Mtl doesn’t propose protected bike lanes on every street.
When there’s a new bike path, it’s the city’s engineers who draw up and approve the technical plans that are then posted on the SEAO for an appel d’offre. They’re not drawn up by politicians on the back of a napkin.
“Traffic flow studies” is another issue entirely. As the name suggests, they have to do with the flow of vehicular traffic. As such they are historically concerned with only one thing: moving as many cars as possible as quickly as possible. There’s no scientific formula. It’s simply about reducing friction for motor vehicles.
Here’s an urban planner and civil engineer who has written a book about the flaws of traffic engineering:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/8/26/we-cant-leave-street-safety-to-traffic-engineers
And some of the problems with traffic studies:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/1/29/the-trouble-with-traffic-studies
But you’re right there is nobody sitting down and master planning every single street and intersection. Things are necessarily done piecemeal because you can’t do everything at once. Montreal has a big problem with consistency but that’s not because engineers aren’t involved, it’s because there are different ways to do things according to legal standards like the MTMD’s Tome V. It’s a problem, but it’s a problem with different engineers taking different approaches. I’ve always wondered why each intersection on the REV St-Denis has different traffic light arrangements. I’ve been told it’s because the traffic engineers want to test out different configurations to see what works best.
Park Avenue’s current setup dates back to 1992 when the reserved lanes were built and the reversible lane was installed. There has been a political desire to redesign Park going right back to the Tremblay administration, but I’ve always been told it relies on the STM’s plans for either a BRT or tramway, and that has never moved forward.
As for Jeanne-Mance — the previous set-up dates back about nine years. Similar bike lanes were painted on streets throughout Montreal (not to mention other cities around Quebec). And yes, it was conflict-prone and not very safe. Which is why the Plateau and other boroughs are in the process of upgrading these kinds of arrangements so that the counterflow lane runs between the sidewalk and parked cars, and the unsafe dooring-zone bike lane in the direction of traffic is replaced by a chausée désignée. The same thing has been done on Prince Arthur and Casgrain, to name a couple of examples.
Again, this is the work of the city’s engineers, who have developed and approved technical plans. It’s not improvised. The politicians push the project forward, but they don’t draw up the plans.
Here’s an example of a minor bike path in Verdun that was developed by the borough’s engineers and sent out for tender:
Certainly the bigger installations like the REV. but the assumption that city engineers are behind all the bike paths is a big one. Even Clark, arguably the most successful Mile End path, had to be redone as it slowly evolved from the original plans with a simple divider into flowerbeds then treed boulevards… with streets that were now too narrow for emergency vehicles to pass.
You don’t just wing it on a $7.7 million project that also involved replacing water pipes and electrical wiring. The treed median were part of the plan from the beginning, as you can see in media coverage from before the project got underway. The problem was that the median that was designed and approved was 30cm too wide, which would have made Clark an official “rue étroite” and parking would have been banned on one side in the winter. The politicians claim they weren’t aware of this outcome. Whether you believe them or not, there were engineers involved who designed those initial plans. It’s not like there was some guy with a shovel who was eyeballing everything.
I don’t blame the people doing the actual roadwork, for sure somebody with a higher pay grade hung someone else out to dry- and yes, I do believe Norris lied through his crooked teeth about it. The version I read was that the initial plan was modified while work was underway, but if not, the initial plan was obviously flawed which usually indicates a rush job.
Either way it had to be torn out and redone after it was completed, and the attitude of officials towards citizens was so egregious Plante had to make an apologetic statement and Norris got his leash shortened. It cost basically twice what it should have.
PS
This whole discussion comes from my assertion that engineering plans aren’t required for bike paths.
Emphasis on “required”. Obviously some do have them, but there is no formal requirement for a study any more than he city paying someone for stenciling flowers over the potholes – which has also been done.
Fun fact: assertions are not facts.
Not by default, no. But if you want to play at word games, go ahead.
If Sorraya really cared about safety, she’d promise to do something about this:
A suspect in the beating of a Jewish father in front of his kids in Park Ex on Friday has been arrested.
Still not clear if this was a hate crime despite the emphasis on the father being Jewish…
If they mention a name I’ll post it. But that won’t necessarily imply a motive.
Fair, I’m criticizing the reporting tone, not you. It is so bursting, simply BURSTING with implication they “dare not name”. Say it or don’t.
Amazingly, he was identified by the community, by Chaverim and tracked until the police arrived. They apparently interviewed him and released him, but rearrested 30 minutes later, after pressure from the chief of police.
The Chaverim are more useful than the police in most instances, no surprise there. Did you hear about a motive? I assume it was what it looks like, and the media are just being coy becasue of police pressure.
I’m curious about “interviewed, released, then arrested him after political pressure” — what would they normally do with an unprovoked assualt?
Simple assault can mean jail time but unless the cops think you will not appear in court you are free to go. It’s at the discretion of the cops – usually.
@Ephraim was the victim Hassidic? It’s not clear from the video but judging by how his kids are dressed I thought so…
I think I’m confused on what arrested means — I thought they could arrest you, charge you, then either let you go until you need to show up to court, or hold you until court/bail. Were they charging this guy before political pressure?
Montreal public health is having emergency rooms report all heat-related deaths as the heat wave continues. With no rain in the forecast, we’re also asked not to waste water.
La Presse has a story about there being no rain in the forecast. It’s initial title was something like “aucun gout a l’horizon” and it quoted an Environment Canada spokersperson; it’s been updated to “Chaleur extrême jusqu’à mercredi,” probably because, according to Environment Canada, there’s a 60% chance of rain on Wednesday. For some reason there’s a tendency to always exaggerate the weather – you’d think our winters *warmed up* to minus-20 and that a typical summer day was 40 degrees the way we talk about weather in Montreal.
Slightly related, shouldn’t there be some kind of obligation for newspapers to publish the various iterations of their stories? “Published at XX, updated at YY” feels inadequate and borderline dishonest sometimes.
Dang! I spotted that “aucune goutte” headline and was going to link to it, but when I went back it was gone.
Thank you. I never like wondering whether I’ve started AI‑ing news content.
Some surprising-to-me implications of a low river water level are discussed in that last article.
Le Devoir updated their dossier Monday on ways for businesses and people with roofs over their heads to cohabit more comfortably with the homeless.
Projects are seeking to make homeless people into more acceptable neighbours by giving them tasks to do.
Another project in the Plateau persuaded businesses to be more friendly to the homeless, offering them water, access to bathrooms and a place to charge their phones.
These pieces followed earlier items on calming fears of the homeless, three initiatives to open links to them, and living alongside homeless camps.
Maybe we could build homes for people to make them no longer homeless. I know it’s a radical idea.
They’re doing a bit of that with the sheds on Louvain and in the Hippodrome, but I haven’t seen any news of how these sites are doing, whether people are using them, how the surrounding neighbourhoods are adapting to them.
I’ve a feeling if they were a big success we’d be told about it, but if they became sites of trouble or nuisance, not so much.
I think the larger point is that there just isn’t enough home-building going on to support the needs of the population, housed and unhoused. That said, new construction takes time and there is an urgent need for housing that will only get worse when summer ends.
We’re absolutely not building enough housing. I have a family member who renovates and builds homes for a living. He just got the permits to build a new home late last week, and he signed a contract to deliver substantial completion (i.e. that the person can move in) on Feb 28. That’s just 6.5 months from now. I was surprised at how quick it was, but he doesn’t work here, he’s in the US. I know single family homes are different from triplexes, which are different from apartment buildings, but construction isn’t that long; permitting, inspection, getting financing set up, etc. Government can’t help with all of that, but we keep reading stories about sites sitting vacant for decades, rezonings that get blocked, affordable housing money just sitting in the city bank account, etc. If you go to cities that build serious amounts, everyone is aligned on that, and we could be. We have, according to the last homelessness census, under 5,000 people without homes in Montreal; if we can’t build 5,000 homes, how seriously are we taking this crisis?
So many areas in which the federal and provincial governments and municipal authorities are at odds, but often seem more interested in preserving their domains even if it means obstacles to dossiers that need to move – housing and public transit being two big ones, although healthcare too.
Whoever comes along in Canada and somehow manages to cut through that Gordian knot and align the levels of government on important matters will have statues made to them.
Le Devoir has found out that half of the city’s indoor pools are in poor condition, with everything from basic infrastructure to the cleanliness of bathrooms facing criticism.
Is there *any* public infrastructure in this city that has been maintained properly? Can we find a single example? Even the new stuff (Place des Montrealaises) has issues.
I mean, if you’re asking… the revamped Maisonneuve library is pretty much immaculate. Dominion Square and Phillips Square are both holding up very well after their renovations. The Jean-Drapeau pool is in great shape. The Esplanade Tranquille and its adjacent chalet have been working brilliantly since they opened. The facilities on Mount Royal are looking pretty good. The Maisons de la culture are generally really nice.
The big issue is that municipal budgets across Canada are extremely limited. And on top of that Montreal has a lot of infrastructure, probably more per capita than any other city in the country. If we’re talking about public pools, there are 113 in the City of Montreal (population 1.9 million) compared to 122 in the City of Toronto (population 2.9 million).
Nicholas 21:30 on 2025-08-11 Permalink
Based on the photos, it’s here; you can see the retaining wall on Iberville as the road drops below the tracks, which is angled so the road is dropping there, the pedestals and fencing and that there’s a yellow line and not a concrete median means it’s not on St Joseph. Also the building is right there on Molson.
Kate 21:54 on 2025-08-11 Permalink
You’re right. I worked not far from there for a year or so, awhile back – should have placed it. Thanks.
Janet 08:53 on 2025-08-12 Permalink
Victoria Mboko, Les Jardins d’Iberville… does the heart good to have these positive, heart-warming stories among all the bad news these days.