Montreal City Weblog

Kate 11:50 on 2025-05-20 Permalink Reply  

• Blork 09:52 on 2025-05-21 Permalink

  I’m still stumbling over the expression “traffic enclave.” I’m picturing a leafy suburb full of streets that are always clogged with traffic because there are no entrances or exits. Just a never-ending existential traffic jam.

• Nicholas 10:50 on 2025-05-21 Permalink

  In some places they call this “unravelling”. They did this specific thing on Gilford, with diverters at Lanaudiere and Chambord in front of a OMHM residence (though that’s been changed after the school street on Lanaudiere that blocks traffic to the south of St Joseph; now there’s just a diverter at Garnier, but you can see the old setup on Google Streetview). People walking and biking can go through, but through traffic in cars cannot, either on the main street or the cross streets; you just get a set of alternating U shapes, sending you right back where you came from. This completely eliminates through traffic, which would be the vast majority of traffic here. I hope it works as well here as it did on Gilford.

• DeWolf 11:26 on 2025-05-21 Permalink

  This is exactly what Montreal has been missing. You can’t have traffic-calmed neighbourhoods until you physically prevent through traffic.

  There have been very tentative attempts at doing this elsewhere in the city, but nothing comprehensive and systematic until Gilford (as Nicholas notes) and now de Rouen.

  Incidentally many other cities have implemented this to great effect. Vancouver is an obvious example: there have been modal filters and deviations in the West End since the early 1990s at least.

• Orr 14:53 on 2025-05-21 Permalink

  What I understand this news story’s “diverters” to be already exist on Clark street between Rachel and des Pins since a few years.

• CE 15:00 on 2025-05-21 Permalink

  The area east of Laurier metro until Papineau between Laurier and Mont-Royal has slowly turned into this type of set-up. To get anywhere in the area by car, it can often require a very carful and difficult route. There is a Communauto station near St. Stanislas De Kostka church which can be absolutely maddening to get to if you don’t follow a specific route. As someone who rarely drives, I think it’s fantastic as few people use my neighbourhood as a throughway (my block has a car drive by maybe once every 5 minutes).

• Kate 15:44 on 2025-05-21 Permalink

  Blork, I used the term “traffic enclave” so blame me – it didn’t come from anywhere else.

• DeWolf 16:34 on 2025-05-21 Permalink

  @Orr the diversions on Clark have made a big difference but the way they’re set up, traffic from St-Urbain often spills onto Clark via St-Cuthbert, which makes no sense to me because those drivers just get jammed up when they try to cross Pine. For the system to really work, Clark needs another diverter at Pine, or maybe it could change direction to become one-way northbound from Sherbrooke to Pine.

• Nicholas 17:18 on 2025-05-21 Permalink

  Orr, DeWolf, the Clark example is a good one, but the setup for the southern one is wrong. The way it works people going south on St Urbain can use Saint Cuthbert as a cut-through. Change Saint Cuthbert there to one-way west from Sewell to Saint Cuthbert and the only way to get in that segment is from Pine via Sewell, and the only way out is then back down to Pine via Clark or St Urbain. You don’t want people using it to getting around a jam; you need to send them back the same way they came. The U off of the Main from Bagg to Clark to Saint Cuthbert is a perfect example: you can’t use it as a cut-through, as it only brings you back to St Laurent backwards.

  There are some other examples of diverters and U, partial and complete, of varying success: around Laurier metro (the two loops that use Bibaud, around Rivard, Berri and Resther), Pontiac to Gilford to Resther, Mentana to Napoleon to St Andre. There are examples where the street grid is just a loop, like the top of Grey to Vendome, or, you know, any of thousands of suburban streets across the region. And then you have whole neighbourhoods that make it hard to cut through, like Circle Road, which is partially one way and has some timed restrictions on entering via other streets, but people ignore those turn restrictions, and those are the kinds of people who will then speed down your street.

  But the cleanest examples are ones where the car street grid is fully disrupted, so no one will ever use it as a cut through. That makes biking and even walking trips faster than driving, depending on the distance. Adding all day bus lanes, and even better making some streets one way for cars but two ways for buses, can do the same for transit. You can also have movable bollards that buses and first responders can pass but others can’t, allowing even more direct transit routes. Montreal has been very slow on circulation plans, so this is very welcome, especially for a city where people will react with incredible hostility to banning cars from a street entirely. Here everyone has access, just not easily enough to use it as a cut through.

• Joey 10:16 on 2025-05-22 Permalink

  @Nicholas I suspect that the city refuses to adjust Clark as you suggest because they rely on it every time St Urbain gets jammed up due to construction (i.e., most of the time).

• CE 13:29 on 2025-05-22 Permalink

  I was thinking about this conversation yesterday while walking around and I think one of the best pieces of infrastructure in the city that has this effect of diverting through traffic is right here on Gilford.