I’m glad to see Montreal moving forward, despite all the people complaining about everything Plante does. Most of her measures have had a positive impact on the city.
With the introduction and expansion of the REM, the expansion of bike lanes, the pedestrian streets in the summer, etc., I think we’re making good progress towards reducing the need for a car.
There’s others problems than cars in Montréal, it’s really dirty, and more and more unsafe, this looks like the New York from the 80s
I totally disagree. Having lived here all my life, Montreal’s never been cleaner. And I’ve never felt safer in this city.
I remember going downtown in the early 2000’s with motorcycle gang strip clubs lining Ste-Catherine near St-Laurent and really shady punks and drug addicts hanging out in some empty lots with trash all around and prostitutes everywhere. Some areas were really dirty with trash all over the place and it smelled like garbage in the summer. Hochelaga, where I currently live, was a white trash ghetto with people on welfare and motorcycle gangs owning most of the bars and terrorizing people.
Nowadays, the red light district has completely changed. Downtown is relatively much cleaner and safer. Hochelaga has become an enjoyable neighborhood with families and honestly really cool shops and restaurants and nice parks.
The only issue that’s happening right now is the increase in homelessness. It’s never been so bad since the CAQ were elected. There has been evictions left and right and tent neighborhoods are popping up everywhere. There’s never been so many homeless people and beggars in Montreal before. The city has asked for help from the provincial government many times, but they keep being ignored.
I can’t wait for the next provincial elections for the CAQ to be kicked to the curb. It can’t happen soon enough.
I’ve moved here little over three years ago now from Toronto, and I have to say Montreal is much dirtier. But I know the exact causes, at least at the first level for this:
- Medium density renters are less organized than single family or high density zoning: with so many people renting (one of the highest in Canada among the big cities) it has people moving around more often, and they are uncaring about their environment. In contrast Toronto high density often comes with property management, while single family zoning areas, even when the house was converted into multiple units, comes with obligations towards the neighbourhood in the form of bylaws.
- Ruelles are somehow an afterthought: Whether plowing in the winter or cleaning (with a street sweeper/washer truck) in the spring and fall, they are completely ignored by the city, letting residents fend for themselves. This comes back again to transient renters in an area then not really caring about their back yards in medium density.
- Garbage collection is very unorganized: Sure, everyone gets green bins and compost bins, but the actual garbage bins don’t come from the city and it’s the wild west. In contrast, in Toronto bylaws regulated the size and number of the bins the landlord had to purchase based on the number of occupants. Collection was a lot less messy when it wasn’t individual guys throwing various sized bins and garbage bags around, but just pulled it up to the lifting mechanism instead.
- Gravel creates a lot of dust: This is especially bad in the spring when the snow melted, but the city is very dusty year round. Either there’s too much gravel use in the winter for the roads or there’s not enough space to capture it. I think the city could do better here by just embracing the snow and ice instead of putting down gravel and salt after they did such a good job of hauling away the snow anyway.
But I’m no urban planning expert, so I don’t have a more abstract insight into these issues.
Edit: to add, I love Montreal despite all its flaws.
That’s a good point. That’s a few things Toronto does better. And I agree that on garbage day it’s total chaos. There’s so much trash all over the place on those days mainly because a lot of people just put their bags directly on the sidewalk. You get squirrels, birds, raccoons, skunks rummaging through the trash and making a mess. We definitely should have standardized bins and regulations for this.
I’ve only seen raccoons on camera here oddly. The one time we left for fifteen days and I set up a camera on our back porch next to the fire escape, I see a big fat one chill there for a couple days.
As a comparison, whining younglings during the night and poop on your porch in the morning was a daily thing in Toronto. They really have that as their mascot there.
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@cyborganism Toronto has eliminated in 2021. Not sure what CultMtl is smoking.
LoL!!! Ben oui t’as raison!
OUI!
FUCK YES!
ENFIN!
Keep up the momentum, we need people to see the future with multimodal transportation.
Another idiotic way that these bicycle obsessed idiots are ruining cities and driving most of the paying traffic out of downtowns. Expecting people to exclusively ride bicycles in places where the weather is not conducive during most of the year is asinine.
Lol “paying traffic”
It’s well documented that pedestrians and cyclists coming into the neighborhood spend more money than some dude driving in from the waste island
This is often the type of remark I hear from people living outside of Montreal or in its suburbs like P.A.T.-RDP or West Island.
We’re talking about parking in the streets, right? Downtown has plenty of private indoor parkings that give you direct access to the malls and the Montreal underground. And you obviously also can go outside as well.
As someone who lives in Montreal and works downtown, the one thing I really hate is how narrow the sidewalks are. There’s barely any room to move, especially in the winter. Unfortunately, the streets are very narrow, so to expand the sidewalk, we need to eliminate parking spaces.
However, in other neighborhoods, like the Plateau or Hochelaga, or other smaller residential places, there needs to be accomodations for cars if we’re to eliminate street parking. This is one thing I find that this administration doesn’t think through.
Expecting people to exclusively ride bicycles
Where do you see this?
In the lack of comprehensive public transportation options for everyone not in the immediate city limits.
Dont get me wrong, Im for the change because I recognize that a change like this is going to suck for the little while it takes things to shift more widely. But I’m also aware that the topic doesn’t have a “one-solution-for-all” answer.
To be fair, everyone “not in the city limits” have complained about public transportation options since forever. Preferring using their cars over anything else.
I don’t think Montréal sucks that much public transit wise. And if you live south shore, it can be accessed by transit very well. In contrast I find people that drive downtown or wherever to work from south shore unnecessarily rather stupid.
That said, Montreal does lack good surface level transit on separated tracks. What Montreal has in the form of “missing middle” lacking in other North American cities, it’s lacking the street car tracks to move all those in the middle around.
The King, Queen and Spadina streetcars are excellent people movers, and it’s a joy to hop on and off of them to hit up multiple places enroute. The same can be said of the 2, 4/6 and 47/49 tram lines in Budapest. Or the metro line 1, which is basically subsurface like the London underground. Or all 12 tram lines in Brno. Or all the lines that hit the Jelačić square in Zagreb.
Imagine if Parc, Mont-Royal (even during the summer) and main still had street cars running, how much easier it would be to get around without the hassle of being stuck in traffic or having to go up and down for five minutes each into metro stations.
Montreal needs to significantly beef up its bus service. It’s a lot cheaper and more flexible than REMs or subways
If it’s electric articulated buses with separated lanes like on Pie IX, I’m all for it.
