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Mobility
fantasy by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR
Great Montreal minds are at work all the time to provide transportation alternatives that would make it easier to get around the city. Here are some of the plans that could cure some of our traffic headaches.
Montreal needs a Trampe, according to Robert “Bicycle Bob” Silverman, who feels strongly enough about the issue to have brought it up at city council meeting a while back. “They said they’d consider it,” says Silverman. What’s a Trampe, you ask? By appearance it’s an almost imperceptible, narrow slot in the pavement that runs alongside a sidewalk from the bottom to the top of a hill. At the bottom of the slope sits a coin box into which you toss the required amount or a swipe a pass. This causes a footrest to pop up. A cyclist can then prop his feet up and enjoy an effortless ride up a mountain as the footrest hums up the track to the top of slope. The world’s only such bicycle tow is on Brubakken Hill in Trondheim, Norway, and has become one of the town’s biggest tourist attractions since installed in September, 1993. In Trondheim, up to 200 cyclists an hour can be pulled up the hill at a pace of two to three metres per second. None have to wait more than 10 seconds to hop on. Other local inclines that could use such a bike tow include the Main just below Sherbrooke (“but that one’s not too hard, I can ride that one if I stand up,” Silverman says), the stretch of Atwater above Sherbrooke and the steep section of Berri. But Silverman thinks the absolute best spot for a bike tow would be on Côte-des-Neiges going up the hill from Sherbrooke. “It’s really steep,” he says. “It’s a tough hill that just wears you out. Look at how many people take the bus up there. A good portion of those bus riders are cyclists. Once they get to the top they would have a marvellous ride to the Jewish General, Sainte-Justine’s, there’s lots of destinations up there.” Silverman believes that a tow would be useful for bike commuters, prove attractive to tourists and would pay for itself. “It’s such an obvious thing but it seems to need an intervention at the highest levels. If someone gets behind it, it could happen. It won’t be easy but it’s not impossible.” Fast
hopping through town Seventeen years ago, Montreal inventor Gregory Lekhtman remembers the moment when he thought up the technological breakthrough that allows citizens to run up to three times their normal pace with far less effort. “I was watching that series The Six Million Dollar Man, so I decided to design a bionic man.” The product he concocted lets the Average Joe approximate Steve Austin’s amazing footspeed with the help of a pair of oval-shaped springs that, when attached to your runners, allow the wearer to spring around at great speeds while putting far less impact on the joints. Running, or “exerloping,” as he calls the hopping sport, requires far less energy than your traditional dash, and stopping is easily mastered simply by landing on one’s heel. The Moscow-born Lekhtman, who gained some notoriety by dating Kim Campbell during her days as prime minister, believes exerloping is not only faster, but also healthier, than running. “My background is electronics and physiology, and I realized that people are not designed to run. The reason is that the information of impact propagates to the nervous system too slowly, and that’s why muscles cannot counteract impact fast enough. This results in injuries to the skeleton,” he says. “I was thinking of making a device that would duplicate the motions of running and make running natural, but at the same time would completely eliminate stress and convert the energy of impact into exercise.” The exerloper is available for $170 (U.S.) on his exerlopers.com Web site, and exhibits what he claims is an immense improvement over earlier versions. Lekhtman says it’s a great method of transportation, but he doesn’t personally bounce around Montreal on his metal alloy springs as a daily means of transportation. “I would love to do it but when I’m running in them people stop and ask lots of questions. This is the only drawback. People get so fascinated by the product. It gets tremendous amounts of attention.” River buses
When Monique Désy Proulx moved from Quebec City to Maisonneuve in Montreal’s east end, she was shocked by the way the area is fenced off from the river via the port. “The St. Lawrence River is magnificent and it’s so important from a symbolic point of view,” she says. “It symbolizes the existence of Quebec and French Canada.” Proulx monitored the recently completed year-long Nicolet Commission, charged with finding solutions for Montreal’s transportation woes, and was stunned when nobody proposed a water-based solution. “They discussed trains, making bridges longer, adding bridges and all sorts of solutions, but nobody thought of using the river. Rather than taking an hour in your car, you could cross the river in five minutes in a boat or hovercraft,” she says. Proulx, a translator by trade, recommends a series of commuter boats running along the shoreline, a system she says is employed successfully in Geneva, among other cities. Even her native Quebec City still transports people across the St. Lawrence from Lévis, she notes. Proulx proposes stops at the eastern tip of the island, Maisonneuve, Old Montreal, Dorval, Brossard and Longueuil, and suggests that water buses would serve the dual purpose of providing transport and opening the river to the greater population. Although citizens are banned from the federally controlled ports, Proulx admits to sneaking in regularly. “Between Viau and the Jacques Cartier Bridge, it’s hardly used at all. They could have promenades and open it to the people, even put in a park,” she says, pointing out that an amusement park sat on the east-end waterfront 100 years ago. “It’s amazing, the government acts like the port is a foreign country,” she says. “We must recover the river.” Another person who has separately touted a boat-bus concept is local inventor Peter Krantz, who in February submitted a proposal to the federal government to place 20 high-speed motorized catamarans on the St. Lawrence. Each vessel could transport 100 passengers and 50 cyclists along the shoreline or across the river with the help of floating docks connected to a ramp from shore, a project he estimates could be accomplished for $30-million. “Imagine a whole transportation network for less than the price of one metro car, plus there’d be no need for road maintenance and you’d never have a traffic jam,” he says. Hovercrafts or high-speed icebreakers could replace the boats in the winter, says Krantz. Comparable systems have proven wildly popular in New York and Hong Kong, he reports. The downtown electric car If Luc Couillard gets his way, as of next March commuters will be able to hop a train or bus into town and pick up one of 120 electric cars and zoom around the city. At the end of the day, they would drop off the car in one of many designated spots, according to Couillard, a project manager at the Agence métropolitaine de transport. The system, which would require participants to phone ahead to book their car, has already shown promise in Europe and Atlanta. Bike lockers On the shopping list of items necessary to encourage cycling, indoor bike lockers hover near the top. Although cyclist advocates have long pestered metro and other authorities to build fully enclosed bike lockers that would guard bikes from theft, weather or vandalism, few have yet to be sold on the idea. Only the Montreal General Hospital went along with the plan and now boasts a set of lockers on Cedar, where bikers can leave their wheels and not spend the rest of the day wondering if they’ll be gone upon their return. Streetcar desires Transport initiatives that are periodically announced, forgotten and revived include a high-speed train to New York and Toronto, an extension of Highway 13 to Mirabel and a beltway that would allow much traffic to bypass our island. So when plans were announced to resuscitate the Rocket, many reacted with skepticism. The Rocket, as the streetcar down Parc was known, would carry commuters downtown faster and in a cleaner way than could a bus, and has inspired an about face by Mile-End councillor Helen Fotopulos, who now embraces the plan. Feasibility studies get underway this summer on the Parc streetcar plan, while similar studies for a light rail project that would see a train pass over the Champlain ice bridge is even farther ahead. That initiative has already moved from the study stage to pre-planning stage. |
