Advocacy groups disagree over car use on Mount Royal
Two groups presented starkly different visions Friday on whether cars should be banned from using Mount Royal as a thoroughfare. While the non-profit group Les amis de la montagne has favoured traffic calming, and improving local arteries on Mount Royal to discourage drivers from using the mountain as a shortcut, environmental lobby group Équiterre said the only way to change habits is by making it more difficult for cars to drive on the mountain. The groups presented back-toback briefs to the Office de consultation publique de Montréal as part of public hearings that are underway about access to the mountain. Hélène Panaïoti, the director general of Les amis de la montagne, said Remembrance Rd./Camillien-Houde Way, the road that cuts across the mountain, was not designed for adequate sharing between drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. She said the road use should be rethought, but that it’s premature to talk about banning cars. “This roadway was developed in the 1950s. It is time to rethink the vocation of this road,” Panaïoti told reporters after her presentation. “We propose transforming it to a scenic route that would encourage cohabitation, with the goal of having people experience the exceptional beauty of the mountain.” She said her group doesn’t want to reduce access to any groups that are using the mountain, either to get to the cemetery, Beaver Lake, Smith House, or the lookout. “We believe there are ways to decrease or eliminate transit, all the while maintaining circulation over the mountain,” she said. Panaïoti said the city should introduce traffic-calming measures like speed bumps in order to force motorists to reduce their speed dramatically. She said that would result in a considerable decrease in the number of cars using Remembrance Rd. and Camillien-Houde Way as a thoroughfare, because it would make it slower for drivers to get through the park. “What we saw this summer (during a pilot project to reduce traffic) was a loss of accessibility,” said Myriam Grondin, head of advocacy for the group. “We want to make sure that wherever you live in the city, you can access all the activities, the cemeteries ... but we don’t want it to be a space for speeding cars or to be used as a shortcut.” While Panaïoti was critical of the pilot project this summer, saying it reduced access and raised safety concerns, she tempered those remarks Friday, saying the project made access more complicated. She added that the closure of the mountain to all vehicles but bicycles on six Sundays created even more problems for people trying to get to Mount Royal. She said the city needs to develop an overall vision for accessibility to Mount Royal, and to vastly improve public transit before adopting measures like banning cars. On the other side of the coin, Équiterre said the city has to take more measures to discourage car use. Jessie Pelchat, the group’s senior researcher on transportation, said the city should consider increasing the daily parking rates on the mountain, among other measures. “We have noticed that elsewhere in the world, parking rates are much higher,” she said. “Having such low parking rates, like at $8 per day, achieves the opposite goal of what we want, which is to encourage public transit to the mountain. We think to modulate the rates according to demand will result in a modal shift to public transit.” She said the city should continue its efforts to reduce and even eliminate car use on the mountain. “We think only by eliminating transit will people slowly change their habits, but it won’t happen overnight,” Pelchat said. “We have to put the measures in place to encourage this modal shift. We think a car has no place in a park.”