Carsick no more

>> Lower Hutchison residents ready to celebrate car ban

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR,
photo by JASON FELKER

Hutchison co-op resident Robert "Bicycle Bob" Silverman has--we ask you--devoted much of his 67 years to a) bicycling b) curing myopia through eye exercises c) co-operative volleyball or d) traffic calming?

All of the above. The traffic calming business, in short, involves making life difficult for urban motorists. A campaign Silverman and his neighbours mounted appears to have finally born fruit as city officials have confirmed that barriers will be put up at the entry to Hutchison south of the Pine-Parc interchange, blocking southbound traffic from Parc.

"They come at 80 km an hour, even though there' s a 40 limit. We don't accept the speeding cars that come in the morning, make noise and prevent us from crossing the street. These cars pollute the street and have made terrible accidents," says Silverman.

Twenty-year Hutchison co-op resident Norman Nawrocki says the barriers will be a major triumph over unbearable traffic. "We can't leave windows open during the day because it gets too loud. You can actually see the see exhaust fumes spilling up into the windows," says Nawrocki, who adds that closing the street to the southbound traffic involved some marathon arm-twisting. "We've been fighting this for years, with demonstrations, press conferences, we've gone door to door with leaflets and pressured city hall with faxes, e-mails and we got hundreds of people to call," says Nawrocki. "Somewhere in this process the city realized, 'Oh, they're not happy.'"

According to city officials the barring of southbound traffic from Parc--which will begin next spring--was favoured by 85 per cent of lower Hutchison residents in a recent city-run survey. André Lazure of Montreal's Public Works department says that the city doesn't make such decisions without serious consideration and study. "When we change the directions of streets it impacts the whole neighbourhood. Sometimes when we solve the problems for one street it causes new problems for streets around it."



The Davidson example

Proof of the headaches traffic calming can bring is currently in evidence on Davidson, the southern continuation of St-Michel Boulevard. Davidson had long been a one-way street, which forced southbound St-Michel traffic onto adjacent residential avenues. People from those streets complained and the city made Davidson a two-way street. Now southbound traffic can breeze straight down Davidson, causing residents of that street to demand it be returned to its quieter ways.

But Lazure says the city has no intention of obliging the Davidson residents. "We try to concentrate the traffic onto big arteries," says Lazure. "Residential streets are for deliveries and residents. They're not meant for transit."

But if Pierre Houle, a Hutchison resident involved in the battle, recommends any one quality to those seeking to lessen the traffic where they live, it would be persistence. "We worked on it for 25 years. I think we beat them through exhaustion but I'll still be skeptical until I see it," he says.

Houle says the next step for the Hutchison residents will be to win a pedestrian-friendly overhaul of the Pine-Parc interchange, which he estimates could be done, in the best case scenario, by 2005. :