Cars had a bumpy start in the city

One hundred and 10 years ago today, a group of enthusiasts met at the Windsor Hotel to organize the Automobile Club of Canada. There were about 70 autos on Montreal Island then, but roadways were so rutted and potholed that driving wasn’t at all comfortable. The club would lobby to have them improved.

Some prominent people were joining the club: La Presse executive Arthur Berthiaume; Francis Redpath of the Canada Sugar Refining Co.; jeweller Gerald Birks; and Arthur Mignault, a wealthy doctor and businessman (who, a decade later, would be instrumental in the founding of the Royal 22nd Regiment).

The condition of Montreal’s roads in 1904 certainly was dire, by today’s standards. Few streets outside the downtown core were paved, so dust in summer and mud in spring and fall were constant trials. In winter, the streets were essentially impassable for wheeled vehicles; they were left unplowed and could be negoti- ated only by sleighs on runners.

For those early and necessarily well-to-do enthusiasts, automobiles were an amusement, little more than toys for grown-ups. They were for happy outings, even simply for showing off. At the Windsor meeting, the club members declared they had no intention of using the recreational carriageway over the mountain — even though they surely would have liked to.

Most Montrealers, like people everywhere, didn’t really know what to make of the newfangled invention.

For some, they were a joke. The first automobile to appear in Montreal’s streets, in November 1899, was owned by Alderman U.H. Dandurand, and it produced chuckles for years.

“Alderman Dandurand was a man of wide proportions,” one Montrealer recalled half a century later, “and he and his wife, not to mention a large progeny, filled the little car. … There was a fixed awning with a fringe on four rods, and there was an L-shaped rod for steering. It was a source of popular hilarity to see that car, on a Sunday afternoon, speeding along Sherbrooke St. from one pothole to another at about six or seven miles an hour.”

There were official speed limits, nine miles an hour in urban areas, which was just three miles an hour faster than a properly driven horse, and 15 in the countryside. However, motorists rarely threatened these limits, given the state of the roads.

Even so, in 1912 the provincial government would introduce a bill to raise the top speeds to 15 and 25, respectively. The measure was defeated, out of concern for an apprehensive public.

That was the other main reaction to this newfangled contraption. If some people laughed at early automobiles, many more were annoyed by them, even left fearful.

The machines were noisy — even more so when they backfired — and could frighten horses, of which there were vastly more in the streets, of course. And their speed, such as it was, often was not well matched by the engineering competence of their builders or the skill of their drivers.

Sure enough, barely two years after that meeting at the Windsor, one Antoine Toutant became Montreal’s first automobile fatality. He stepped in front of a stopped tram on Ste-Catherine St. and was knocked down by a car passing the tram. Just six days later a motorist, trying to pass a farmer resolutely keeping his wagon in the middle of a road in Lachine, struck and killed a seven-year-old boy who dashed out in front.

These deaths point to another problem faced by early motorists and people on foot alike: Rules of the road that everyone understood were still wanting.

Thus, as The Gazette’s report of the Windsor Hotel meeting notes: “The public appeared to be in the dark as to the proper side to be taken by automobilists on the road, and the statement was authoritatively made that when an automobile meets a carriage, the former should go to the right and when overtaking a carriage it passes to the left.”

A considerate motorist meeting an oncoming, horse-drawn vehicle might even stop, allowing the teamster or carriage driver to stop as well and hold his horse’s head, before passing on his way himself. Indeed, in Ontario, not only was the motorist obliged to stop; it was he who also had to lead the presumably nervous horse safely past.