Mayor firm on Mount Royal pilot project
Mayor Valérie Plante brushed off a more than 10,000-name petition Monday, saying that a pilot project to bar vehicles from crossing Mount Royal will go ahead despite the opposition’s demand for public consultations on the issue.
“There are different petitions going on,” Plante said to reporters at city hall.
“There’s one for the project and there’s one against it.”
Plante was referring to a counter-petition supporting the administration’s decision to ban through traffic on Mount Royal starting this spring. It had 653 signatures as of Monday evening.
A petition launched just over a week ago opposing the pilot project closing the mountain to through traffic had 10,186 names.
Speaking with reporters before Monday’s council meeting, Opposition leader Lionel Perez reiterated his demand that the city hold public consultations before going ahead.
“They made their decision without any consultation at all, whether it was with Les amis de la montagne, the Table de concertation du Mont-Royal or the boroughs. There’s been no impact study on the neighbouring streets,” he said.
“I say, let Montrealers speak out,” Perez said.
But Plante said: “We are moving forward with the project.”
The controversy over the plan to shut down traffic on the mountain just shows that “Mount Royal is important to people, how precious it is,” she said.
Plante said there has been misinformation spread about the effects of the shutdown.
“People are saying there will be no access to the mountain. It’s absolutely wrong,” she said, adding that people will still be able to reach the two cemeteries from Mount Royal Park.
Plante said there have been two consultations on transportation on the mountain in the past 10 years.
“It’s time to move forward,” she said.
Jennifer Crane, a supporter of the petition, said the plan to ban traffic across the mountain shows the Plante administration’s real agenda is to place more restrictions on cars throughout the city as it has in Plateau-Mont-Royal.
“The Projet Montréal administration admit they don’t like cars. Now they want to shut down our mountain,” she said.
Crane described herself as a resident of Ridgewood Ave. in Côtedes-Neiges, close to the mountain.
However, she acknowledged under questioning that she was a political organizer for previous mayor Denis Coderre for the past five years, until the Nov. 5 election.
“That really doesn’t have anything to do with it,” said Crane, insisting she was simply speaking out as a private citizen.
Crane also denied that she was the originator of the petition, saying the person who started it could not be found.
Perez said Crane worked for Coderre’s party, now renamed Ensemble Montréal, until the election, but no longer has a relationship with it.
The petition “has nothing to do with us. It was her own initiative,” Perez said.
Controversy over the plan to bar vehicles from using the mountain as an alternative east-west route across the city continued to swirl as a study for the Montreal Metropolitan Community (MMC) showed that efforts to lure people to use public transit instead of cars has not been successful.
Two-thirds of Montreal-area residents still commute by car and their number has grown by 142,000 in 15 years, it said.