Planning to move

Montreal’s long-term transportation
vision contains tons of ideas,
not all of them popular

GIVE US OUR BOULEVARD:
Coalition pour humaniser la rue Notre-Dame’s
Monique Désy Proulx and Carl Bégin

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Adopted by city council last week, Montreal’s new transport plan certainly contains a lot of information. Available for public perusal on the city’s homepage (ville.montreal.qc.ca), it’s a whopper of wonk, and transport nerds will no doubt ogle the 246-page PDF with leering interest.

There’s a lot in there. Ideas about building a light rail line to Trudeau airport from downtown, for instance, and increasing the number of reserved bus lanes, a tramway system, updating the metro’s fleet of 40-year-old cars, extending the metro’s blue line to Pie-IX and major road spending. It spans two decades, and is supposed to cost somewhere a bit over $8-billion. It’s ambitious and, of course, controversial.

In the east end neighbourhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, the Coalition pour humaniser la rue Notre-Dame remains distinctly unimpressed. They’ve been battling hard to block the city’s plan to remake (modernize, the city says) the artery, which involves widening to four lanes in each direction. The coalition says it will double the number of vehicles using the street, to 150,000 a day.

“It’s very contradictory,” says the Coalition’s Carl Bégin. He says the city is claiming to encourage a reduction of dependency on cars and boost public transportation, but by widening Notre-Dame, it’s doing the reverse. He also says the revamped Notre-Dame will make access to the river more difficult.

“Cities around North America and the world are fighting to recuperate space from automobiles,” he says. “Currently, Notre-Dame belongs to the provincial Ministry of Transport. We’d like to see Montreal become the owner, so then we could change it into a real urban boulevard.”

(The city insists that Notre-Dame will become an urban boulevard, but Bégin doesn’t believe it. “A real boulevard has an interaction with the neighbourhood it passes through,” he says, claiming the plan ignores the surrounding areas. They’ll be holding an info session tonight, Thursday, June 26, at 1475 Bennett, corner Adam, at 7:30 p.m.)

Arthur Sanborn, Greenpeace Montreal’s climate change campaigner, says the plan to add 75,000 more cars to Notre-Dame is a bad idea, even if one lane is reserved for buses and taxis and another is reserved for car-pooling. The rest of the plan has some merits, he says, but he says it contains “nothing new…. Honestly, it’s not enough. It won’t get done in time because there is so much institutional blockage.”

But city spokesman Darren Becker disagrees. He says that, since the Tremblay administration took over in 2001, their priority has been to establish a long-term plan for the city’s transportation future. “The Notre-Dame project had been under study for over 30 years,” he says. “People had always said the status quo is unacceptable.” Numerous studies were conducted, numerous meetings with stakeholders were held and the administration rejected numerous ideas—such as converting Notre-Dame into a sunken highway like the Decarie—out of hand. He calls the accusations that the city steamrolled the project over residents’ opposition “completely unfair.”

“Obviously there will be nay-sayers to every project,” he says. “There’s never going to be a full consensus.”

Another contentious issue that was floated recently was the idea of introducing entry tolls to the island. Becker says the idea is far from certain, but has its merits: the transportation plan’s budget calls for an average $400-million to be spent per year. Becker says the city can use $200-million per year from its operational budget, but needs extra financing to achieve all its goals.

Construction on Notre-Dame is expected to begin this fall.