Invasion of the
Shore dwellers

Griffintowners worry that the Bonaventure
project will flood their streets with hordes
of dreary commuters

THE WHEELS ON THE BUS DON’T GO ’ROUND AND ’ROUND:
Rush hour traffic at downtown terminus

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Here we go again. The city presents a plan, local residents are annoyed, the plan undergoes increased scrutiny and its entire future is up in the air. Or, in the case of the Bonaventure expressway, which the city plans to demolish and replace with an eight-lane urban boulevard, down on the ground.

The citizens in this case are the members of the Committee for the Sustainable Redevelopment of Griffintown (CSR Griffintown), a group of about a dozen neighbourhood residents who cut their teeth fighting the Devimco mega-project a couple of years ago. The complaints made to the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM)—which released a report last week criticizing the project—have been heard before, in at least two separate dossiers regarding legacy traffic projects: the Turcot interchange and the Notre-Dame E. highway. The CSR says the Bonaventure project is another misstep for Mayor Gérald Tremblay’s administration, one that will cost taxpayers millions and make Griffintown more dangerous and less healthy to boot.

“The big thing is how the city does this,” says CSR Griffintown spokesman Jeffrey Dungen, in an echo of complaints heard before. He says that a lot of time, money and grief could have been spared had the city held consultations with the public and got urban planners and engineers on board before going ahead with the project. “Political interests are pulling the strings. Instead of thinking long-term, they think in four-year chunks, until the next election. That’s why these projects always flop. They’re done politically instead of professionally.”

Whose Dalhousie?

The biggest sticking point is the Dalhousie corridor. Dalhousie is a small street parallel to the Bonaventure that would be converted to accommodate the hundreds of buses coming to the downtown terminus on de la Gauchetière from the South Shore. The city says the plan would increase traffic flow by getting the buses off University and get suburbanites onto buses and out of their cars. The corridor would eventually handle over 1,400 buses—and close to 100,000 commuters—a day. Converting Dalhousie into a corridor will cost an estimated $119-million. “That’s a huge sum of money to make the buses go 30 seconds faster,” Dungen says.

Another aspect to the project includes erecting office and residential towers at the city-end mouth of the boulevard, and installing five sets of traffic lights along the proposed boulevard. Revitalization and traffic calming, the city calls it. But Dungen sees a different scenario: empty buildings and more noise, more pollution and even less east-west access than before. “The city says it will be auto-financing, meaning that all the freed up land, and the companies and people who will move in there, will increase the tax base. But that’s a load of crap. There are tons of vacant lots in the area already.”

Most irksome to Dungen and others is the apparent sclerosis surrounding the light-rail connection from the South Shore to the city. This is an idea that’s been around for decades, in one form or another. Before the light-rail, a monorail was considered, to run along the ice-breaker bridge just west of the Champlain Bridge. But it appears to CSR Griffintown that none are being seriously considered. “There are trams, commuter trains, light-rail trains—there’s a whack of options that don’t require buses, or at least require many fewer buses. We could use them for the next five or 10 years, and then have them phased out.”

COMING DOWN: Bonaventure expressway

Politics and beyond

The political situation, meanwhile, is messy. The Tremblay administration is championing the project, but Richard Bergeron, the pro-public-transit, pro-city-living Projet Montréal leader who happens to be the executive committee member responsible for urban planning, welcomed the OCPM report, saying the project was in fact “very well-received” by consultation participants. According to a statement released last week, the executive committee mandated the city and the Société du Havre de Montréal to further study the issue. But Dungen says Bergeron’s once high-minded vision of collective transportation may have been compromised by his new position on the executive committee. “He makes me a bit nervous,” he says. “I don’t know where his real ties and alliances are.”

Preparatory work is already underway on the 40-plus-year-old expressway—it too was built in the heady, optimistic days prior to Expo 67—but Dungen is hoping the province steps in to set right what he sees is wrong. “We’ve been blasting the provincial government for taking such a long time,” he says. “It’s a regional transportation problem, but they said, ‘Wait for the OCPM report, wait for the OCPM report.’ And now it’s out, and the city screwed up. So now is the time for the Transport Ministry to step in.”