by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Montreal is coming closer to seeing a huge, gleaming hospital to eclipse all others, right behind the Vendôme metro. Now the planners are embarking on the sticky job of soft-selling the upcoming traffic mayhem to the residents around the area.

Last week about 30 West Enders came to a little-publicized meeting with McGill planners in an office on Guy.

A beefy button-down bureaucrat named Biff or Lance or whatever the French equivalent is aimed his narrow red flashlight at diagrams revealing plans to reverse the course of roads, cut off streets and put in all sorts of new traffic lights in anticipation of this megaproject.

The planners looked like they were skating on a March pond. They repeatedly made unprovoked, pre-emptive pleas for civility. A uniformed police officer looked on.

The first thing you'll see from their plan is that 100 per cent of the superhospital will be built on the NDG side. The wealthier Westmounters get a green space, a bike path and a pretty lake.

You can't even drive onto the site from Westmount.

The planners defended this, explaining that a Westmount entry would require an impossibly steep ramp over the tracks, or a tunnel beneath, impossible due to the metro line below.

Perhaps the most radical surprise was reserved for St-Raymond, my secluded Italian enclave in lower NDG sealed off by a cliff, a highway and the CPR tracks. There are three roads out but only one convenient one, the busy de Maisonneuve and Décarie intersection.

Planners are proposing to block the neighbourhood from that crucial exit. Their plan is to have southbound traffic scoot off the Décarie Expressway at Sherbrooke then straight down Addington. It will then continue left on de Maisonneuve and down Décarie Boulevard, which will both be transformed into two-way stretches.

Planners feel that our participation at this area would overburden the intersection, turning it from a freakishly dysfunctional headache zone into a catatonic basketcase of five competing roads.

Motorists from my area would be welcomed up Girouard, currently a one-way down. Long ago cars could go that route but legend has it some kids were run over on their bikes around 1968 and it was turned into a one-way south.

The planner who hatched this scheme is a middle-ager from France named Didier. The neighbourhood would get a roundabout at Upper Lachine and Girouard, and vehicles entering the highway to the South Shore would be forced to come all the way up Girouard and circle it.

The hospital types vaguely promised some goodies in return, such as a new entry to the Décarie northbound from St-Jacques, although they tossed conditional semantics into the wording, the way you tell a small child that she might get a pony if she puts her shoes on.

Superparking at the superhospital will be underground. A tunnel through the cliff on the south side of the project will welcome staffers and delivery trucks, estimated at about half the cars expected to arrive at the site.

One irritatingly clever woman in the back kept offering solid suggestion, such as a new ramp to the site off Highway 20 to prevent a lot of traffic from invading the area. This suggestion was nixed, as it would cost $140-million.

Rather than shouting, residents silently digested as much detail as they could, a series of anticipatory computations filled all heads as everybody tried to visualize the plan that would permanently change the neighbourhood.

Then they started shouting.

Having watched city politics long enough, I've learned that citizens often have to be overbearing. Relentless irritation is often the only thing that gets a politician's ear. Swift, unrelenting and timely vigilance is usually required to make or break a plan. It's your will against the machine.

I hope my neighbourhood both maintains its current access and the old route up Girouard, and that the old two-way direction gets reopened.

As recently as 1958 horses would lazily sniff around in stables at Décarie and de Maisonneuve. Times sure change.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca