The STM wants to generate more advertising revenue after the visit from the English researchers showed that its technology is behind the times and its revenue stream is too dependent on user fares. I guess we’ll have to resign ourselves to more buses wrapped in advertising promos; the notion of creating more rentable office space in its stations isn’t a bad idea at all, and I hope the notion mentioned almost in passing of creating a transit museum at Jean-Drapeau doesn’t get forgotten.
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I see that the Mirror has a new website design with all the usual social networking icons and a lot more razz.
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The World Press Photo Tour is back in town for a month at the Just for Laughs museum, again shown alongside other photo exhibits in the huge space that was a brewery long ago. A show that’s always good, it’s also always harrowing, showing images from crises, disasters and wars. And one of the other shows is about Haiti.
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Neath gives us a photo tour of the Southwest with a ride on the 37 bus from Vendome to Angrignon.
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I’m told that for technical reasons our bandwidth may be somewhat reduced for a couple of days. Sorry if things are slow and a bit bumpy, but it won’t be for long.
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At tonight’s free concert, Kent Nagano announced he’s signed on for another stint till 2014 with the MSO. A whisper of a downside to this from Paul Wells.
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I’ve been walking up Saint-Laurent often lately and crossing under the tracks at Van Horne. I’d prefer not to walk under there but with trespassing fines being thrown at people crossing above ground, I’m hesitant to follow the natural line of least resistance through the fence and across the tracks.
About half the cyclists that go under the tracks take the sidewalk. On a bicycle, I do this myself. There seems to be a natural human desire to get through an underpass quickly, and it’s extremely unpleasant to be on a bike, suddenly plunged into darkness, with a rough concrete wall too close on the right and vehicles zooming too close on the left as they, too, speed up to get out of the thing. One feels, and probably is, much safer on the sidewalk, separate from the motor traffic.
However, the city has caught on to this trick. On the east side, there are now barriers on the sidewalk at both ends of the underpass (although someone has already worked one half of the southern pair loose and taken it away, see photo below):
They also put up this sign recently.So maybe it would make sense now for pedestrians to take the east sidewalk of the underpass and let cyclists use the west side? Walking this underpass with cyclists whizzing past you in the dark can be risky; on the other hand, you can’t cycle it without risking plowing into pedestrians.
Until the good sense of the level-crossing movement comes to fruition, let’s get organized, people. A little citizen initiative would sort this mess out.
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The Montreal marathon is run on Sunday. I was amused by the extreme specificity of the time allotted for the closure of de Bellechasse near the Main.A record number of runners has signed up to participate this year.
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With training camp looming, the Canadiens have finally signed Carey Price to a two-year contract.
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After all, Benoît Labonté is not on his way to Burkina Faso to help the town of Kombissiri sort out its governance but no further details are forthcoming.
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Rue Frontenac will be distributing a printed tabloid on Thursdays starting at the end of October (a plan that suggests little hope for a resolution of the lockout anytime soon). It will be free.
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Guillaume Saint-Jean has a new then-and-now of the Methodist church turned black community centre which has been abandoned now since 1994, and Archives de Montréal shows us the corner of Ste-Catherine and Atwater with the Forum as it was in 1966 and the hideous excrescence it has become in our time.
Guillaume continues to add to his fascinating photo set of churches in Quebec converted for other purposes.
Coolopolis also looks back at Montreal’s Crystal Palace, which stood in two different locations before burning down definitively in 1896.
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AJ
Saw a piece on the news yesterday about the movement to reopen the community centre. Also of note, there are plans to resurrect the Empress Theatre (aka Cinema V) as a permanent home for the Black Theatre Workshop.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2010/08/31/mtl-negro-centre.html
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Researchers from England have found that while Montreal’s metro is environmentally sound, its buses aren’t so green. Anyone who’s had to eat a bus’s exhaust in traffic already knew this, but the STM is slowly moving in the direction of less polluting buses, which has to be good.
(I note in passing that the English researchers accepted the local electricity supply as unquestionably green, whereas we know there’s been serious environmental damage caused in the construction of hydro dams. That’s another argument.)
Meanwhile, the STM may have to modify a tender for new software to consider the possibility of open source options.
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david tighe
Could it be that the controversial rubber tyres (which I am ambivalent about given the enormous infrastructure costs they impose) actually contribute to reliability? It would be the only plus I can imagine.
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William
I think it’s completely scandalous that the STM is allowed to squander millions on kitschy and trite publicity campaigns while these dreadful ancient buses continue to ply our roads. Maybe the city should offer the STL a chance to run buses here.
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The MSO is offering a free public show Thursday evening to open its season. Radio-Canada is coy on details, but the symphony site says it’s at 7 p.m. and has a diagram showing where the stage will be.
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Foreign students who don’t know Quebec’s apartment rental rules are getting skinned by unethical landlords and the Concordia student union is trying to push back. Some landlords are also asking for personal information they have no right to.
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Public health authorities are starting a project to act against landowners who allow ragweed to flourish.
I think it’s going a bit far to say ragweed makes so many people sick. Am I “sick” because I occasionally get sneezy and sniffly this time of year? I’d rather put up with that than countenance the obliteration of a native plant that’s part of a whole ecology: “The seeds are an important winter food for many bird species. Ragweed plants are used as food by the larvae of a number of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths).” (Wikipedia)
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A young man was savagely beaten then abandoned in Carré Saint-Louis last night; a mysterious shooting last night in RDP was witnessed by several bystanders, but the victim fled, no blood or other evidence could later be found by police, and nobody showed up with bullets in them at any hospital. (Theory: maybe it was a starter pistol or some other fake gun?)
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Chris Erb on Spacing does a deft dissection of District Griffin, noting how Devimco’s “greenwashing tactics and pandering to opponents seem to have been sharpened since 2007 when they came into Griffintown, guns blazing.”
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William
It seems to me that there is a fine line between “consensus building” and “pandering to opponents”
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OK, I have to admit I like this: photos of cups of cappuccino at various espresso joints around town. No reviews, just a photo of a coffee on a counter or tabletop.
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Owners and drivers of taxis are complaining that Bixi is cutting into their ridership.
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In another step toward the full gentrification of the Plateau, noise from bars and venues is being much more heavily ticketed now.
This is really too bad, because the Plateau has plenty of quiet residential streets in between its major arteries, if you want the best of both worlds. But you shouldn’t move into an apartment on the Main or Mont-Royal or Saint-Denis expecting the silence of Pointe-Claire after 9 p.m., and it’s unfair to enforce that expectation on others.
The borough’s also going to crack down on public urination and other forms of “incivility.”
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walkerp
I totally agree. We live just around the block from the Main and so get ancillary wackiness and noise late on Friday and Saturday nights. But start cracking down on that and you start to suppress all the manifold benefits (culture, social liveliness, tons to do, etc.) that we get from living in the area. I’d love people to litter less, but don’t want to see any laws on having fun
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The heat wave seems to be driving a growing grumble about air conditioning in the metro as both Projet Montréal and Vision Montréal begin asking for AC in the new cars we’ll be getting along about 2015 or so, maybe.
(This topic must be hot: I got more comments on a post about it four days ago than I usually get for this sort of thing.)
Christian Duperron sums up the arguments on both sides and the Gazette explains how the STM is in the midst of improving metro ventilation and that the new cars should generate less waste heat than the current ones.
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Marc
I’d much rather see A/C in the buses rather than the Metro. You spend less time in the latter. The bus drivers union has been asking for it for ages.
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zach
People take so long to get onto buses I dont even think AC would work. Not to be handicapist but Ive been stuck on the 80 many times for fifteen minutes while the driver tried to open the ramp… that would surely void any AC.
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blork
But on a bus you have the possibility of catching a breeze. I spend about 90 minutes a day on the Metro, and on a day like today it is stifling. The station is hot and breezeless, the platform is hot and breezeless, and the Metro car is hot and breezeless. Just kill me now!
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Tux
I’m in favour of AC on the metro and in the buses. Some days, the bus is hell… standing for 45 minutes, sweaty smelly bodies crushed in all around you, sweat dripping down your face… it makes you want to buy a car. If we increased the comfort level on our public transport, perhaps more people would use it, resulting in a net gain in environmental cleanliness from the cars more people riding transport would get off the road…
Obviously I have no statistics or expertise, but it seems to me anything that gets people to stop using their cars is a good thing, no?
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Suaveman
The tendering of contact for metro cars is happening right now. Projet Montréal is saying: ‘Let’s add air-conditioning to the requirements, as we’ll be stuck with these cars for 50 years from now’.
It would add approx. 2% to the cost of the wagons and would increase comfort levels to meet those of the automobile.
Ever worn a suit in the metro during summer? A jacket in the winter? You’ll sweat through your clothes before getting to work.
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Without even buying a ticket, the MSO will be getting $35.5 million from Loto-Québec over the next four years.
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In a coup worthy of an Evelyn Waugh hero, Benoît Labonté is off to Burkina Faso to help the town of Kombissiri figure out its municipal government. English Wikipedia hasn’t got much about the town but French Wikipedia says it has 16,821 inhabitants and is a centre of sweet potato production.
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Valid commentary about the incongruity of strange modern buildings being constructed within rows of vintage housing.
Martin 09:02 on 2010/09/03 Permalink
Better watch out, my girlfriend was caught by a cop that had nothing else to do than issue a fine for cycling on this portion.
I understand that it may be scary for pedestrians, but your solution is quite neat and perfectly effective. Let’s petition the borough on this. Ferrandez is hopefully open about cycling.
Ian 09:08 on 2010/09/03 Permalink
Here’s a totally crazy suggestion: if you’re not a little kid, walk your bike when you’re on the sidewalk. This is actually a law that applies everywhere in the city, not just underpasses. It only adds a couple of minutes to your ride, it’s not some kind of insane impediment to your bike ride. I’m actually pretty fed up with all the clowns that ride their bikes on busy sidewalks, and there seems to be an exceptionally high percentage of them in the Plateau. Riding your bike on the sidewalk is unsafe and inconsiderate.
Chantal 09:18 on 2010/09/03 Permalink
I hate to admit that this is one place (the St-Laurent passage) that i ride my bike on the sidewalk but i try as much as possible to use the St-Urbain bike path which is separated from traffic with a concrete barrier. I just wish the north end of it was easier to access.