La Presse has a two-parter Monday on how decrepit the city’s sports facilities are, and what the parties are promising in that area in the election campaign.
In other campaign news, Craig Sauvé wants to make Montreal a capital of affordable housing, with ambitious plans to build and an idea for a fund to help tenants; Luc Rabouin also talked housing, but without Sauvé’s fire.
Meantime, an Action Montreal candidate (Gilbert Thibodeau’s lot) has been noted for making offensive social media posts.
The change of garbage pickup to every two or three weeks has become an election campaign issue in Mercier‑Hochelaga‑Maisonneuve where Ensemble’s candidate is promising to reinstate weekly pickups in the summer, Projet’s is talking about cleanliness brigades, and Transition wants better information given out to residents.
In contrast, St-Laurent has done all right with biweekly pickups, not experiencing the kind of random dumping of trash that’s plagued MHM since pickups were reduced.
Look at the photo in La Presse: those are exactly the kind of communal bins we need in densely populated neighbourhoods like the Plateau, Petite-Patrie, Villeray, etc. It would simplify garbage collection and you can avoid the mess created by having door-to-door pickup with all the resulting spillages, bags and bins put out at the wrong time, etc.
As Molok is a Finnish company I’m sure they have it figured out, but I wonder how they work with freezing temperatures & snow removal… That does seem like a relaly good solution to the vermin issue.
I’d love a communal bin like that, what a great idea.
Those bins are actually recessed into a much deeper pit — about three feet deep.
A friend of mine who has the same setup told me this story: one of their neighbours left a garbage bag leaning against the communal bin. When the truck came to lift the bin out of the pit, the bag slipped in and fell down the hole. Ever since, they haven’t been able to get the bin seated properly again.
And of course, the garbage collectors aren’t going to fix that for you.
The underground solution is basically perfect in almost every way: animals, smells, cleanliness, convenience (you can bring your stuff any day of the week and they dispatch a truck to empty it when sensors detect it’s almost full). The biggest issue is people have to bring their bags to the corner. In walkable cities that’s fine, and Montreal is pretty walkable, but for people who complain about having to put food in a separate bag as other garbage, I can just see the headlines for some senior falling on their walk to the corner in the ice with their heavy, unbalanced bag.
Would that mean that there would need to be a construction project on every single city block?
No big deal, just another line item on those half-million bulbouts.
They trialed those communal bins in HoMa, too. You can see them here:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/NUMfzcHjcuQWZmV47
For some reason, I think I remember reading that they were not moving forward with them in that neighbourhood, but I can’t seem to find any articles about it right now. On Google you can see that they were installed sometime between 2009 and 2012.
I wonder why it worked for Ville St-Laurent, but not HoMa.
DeWolf 10:08 on 2025-10-14 Permalink
For many Action Montréal supports that’s a feature, not a bug.