Taming traffic

This is regarding your story on Avenue Verte Montreal [“Today Mont-Royal, tomorrow the Plateau,” Jan. 9]. I have a question for the “greeners”: is it a ghetto you shut yourself in?

Here’s a revolutionary idea: instead of making it more difficult for people to move around by blocking streets - and what many anti-car types forget is that there are people in those cars - make it easy for people to leave their cars behind.

For example, Denver has no-fare, battery-powered, pollution-free buses running along some of its downtown streets. Full-sized buses going in both directions, behaving like shuttles. They’re great. Why not along Mont-Royal, from St-Laurent to Papineau? Why drive when you can ride for free? No expensive infrastructure changes, no hassle with deliveries to stores, no extra traffic on residential streets, fewer cars, less pollution, more people. Everybody happy?

How to pay for it? What happened to the 1.5 cent per litre public-transportation tax paid every time you fill up on the island of Montreal? Has the provincial government stolen those funds to pay for the worse-than-useless “redesigned” Place Victoria? Speaking of Old Montreal, how about free parking for out-of-province cars around the outskirts of Old Montreal and smaller, battery-powered buses running fare-free into Old Montreal during the height of the tourist season?

Close St-Paul as former mayor Bourque suggested? No thanks! Every other narrow street would become more clogged. Those of us who actually live and work in Old Montreal have to be able to move in and out of the area too.

Of course, the easiest partial solution to the traffic congestion on Mont-Royal is to coordinate the traffic lights. That’s something the city of Montreal has never been able to do - the only major city in North America. A unique characteristic that does not fill one with island-wide civic pride.

» Ronald S. Diamond

Troubling erections

What your reader L.S. Cattarini cannot seem to imagine is that communal nudity is not exciting [E-mail, Jan. 9]. It’s the idea of communal nudity that’s exciting, especially if you have never been in a naturist environment. The erection, which troubles 99 per cent of men before they have their first naturist experience, simply does not occur when you are there just to relax in a recreational context.

And about clothes? As Carlyle said, they have surely made men of us, but if we never do without them, they are threatening to turn us into coat hangers.

» Michel Vaïs, Founder,
Fédération québécoise de naturisme

Bush bashing

It was a pleasure to read Ken Hechtman’s interview with radical historian Howard Zinn [“Hell no, we shouldn’t go,” Jan.16]. Also great was witnessing thousands of anti-war protesters on a bone-chilling Saturday. The fact that there were plenty of similar demonstrations in cities like Tokyo, Washington, Lahore and Ottawa demonstrates the depth of opposition to Dubya’s planned bloodbath in Iraq.

Bush is obviously trying to capitalize on U.S. patriotism in the wake of 9-11 and is using the war against Iraq as an option to boost his popularity ratings and get himself reelected.

He is also employing the bellicose rhetoric toward Iraq as a red herring to draw attention away from a failing economy. The U.S. economy is going to pot on a popsicle stick. Many U.S companies have announced huge layoffs in the last year, and just this month, K-Mart announced that it would eliminate 35,000 jobs.

Why then participate in a futile, dangerous war that will kill thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and will only serve to line the pockets of weapons manufacturers? Does the desire to control Iraq’s oil supply warrant endangering world peace? Ironically, Bush is no great patriot. While the president’s pets have health care insurance, thousands of American war veterans don’t, hence often die prematurely. How sad and disgusting.

» Manish Patwari

More Pinto putdowns

How lovely it must be for Shiromi Pinto to have her linguistic abilities valued by her British colleagues while the rest of us Montrealers (with the exception of Yann Martel) must be content with grunting and squawking at each other in our desperate attempts at intelligible conversation [E-mail, Dec. 24].

Those prestigious institutions she attended should be congratulated for the thoroughness with which they have instilled in Ms. Pinto a belief in the inherent superiority of certain linguistic repertories over others. For those of you with impoverished vocabularies, this means that, like, for example, if people in England think Canadian English sucks, then it does suck! If a Frenchman is irritated by Québécois, it’s only because Québécois is irritating, putain!

The only difference between such views and the views of some proponents of Bill 101 is the former are so dominant that it is not necessary to enforce them with laws. Generally, those who stand to benefit most from the ideology are the ones who subscribe most wholeheartedly to it. Thank you, Ms. Pinto, for taking the time to provide us with a shining example of what academic types (if we had any) might call cultural and linguistic hegemony in action. Have a brilliant trip back to London and do let us know when you’re in town next - we’ll try to use a few big words while shopping on Ste-Catherine so as not to upset your sensibilities any further.

» Mara Young

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