Road rage peaks over Mount Royal plan
Montreal mayor feels wrath of commuters over project blocking crosstown shortcut
MONTREAL— Way back in 1955, Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau asked his audience in a speech to peer into the future and imagine a road running up and over Mount Royal, the iconic mountain park for which the city is named. The man who would bring Montreal a subway system, Expo 67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics had done this himself and he told of what he had seen.
“There is no doubt that, in 50 or100 years, Montrealers will look back on those of 1955 and marvel that they had to go around the mountain to get around town rather than passing over or under it,” Drapeau said.
“The mountain must not be an obstacle to traffic.”
It took six years, but Drapeau got his road. Rather than cutting a northsouth trail across Mount Royal, the two-lane Camillien-Houde Way followed the winding east-west path of an old tramway.
It allowed vehicles to roar up the mountain to its wooded trails and summit lookouts or to simply bomb down the other side, shaving minutes off of a crosstown commute.
But as Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante sets out to reverse that procar transit policy by turning a busy shortcut across Mount Royal back into a simple park entrance, she is discovering that Drapeau’s prediction may have been spot on.
Like the pushback Toronto Mayor John Tory is facing over the King St. streetcar pilot, Plante and her leftwing municipal party are learning how tightly car-borne commuters cling to their comforts.
Announced earlier this month, the city plans to block Camillien-Houde Way at the top of Mount Royal this spring. Cars will still be able to drive up and park but only city buses would be allowed to go straight across to the other side.
An online petition has collected more than 22,000 signatures of people urging the city to abandon the plan.
“Enough is enough already,” said one of the many written comments. “Car drivers being penalized for nothing? What the hell?”
Other reactions have ranged from confusion and frustration to outrage. And yet, the traffic-limiting measure is in line with what many other big cities are doing to cut traffic and pollution. London slapped a congestion charge on vehicles seeking to drive through the downtown core 15 years ago. Paris Mayor Ann Hildago recently boasted of a 4.8-per-cent drop in traffic in the year since drivers were forced to obtain a permit to drive in the city.
And in New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last month that the city was banning cars from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park after a successful summer trial.
The idea to restrict car use on Mount Royal has been around for about a quarter century, but the plan to sever the road at the mountain’s summit took on a new urgency after the death last fall of a young cyclist, Clément Ouimet, who was struck by a car making an illegal U-turn on the road.
“When the accident with Clément Ouimet happened there was such a wave of shock and frustration and solidarity that it was almost like it would be done the day after,” said Luc Ferrandez, the borough mayor in Montreal’s Plateau-Mont-Royal district, who is responsible for the city’s parks on Plante’s executive committee.
He originally came up with a plan to only allow cars to ascend the mountain from its west side, but backed away from it. He said the city will also allow unrestricted use of the road 30 busy days throughout the year, when Mount Royal attracts its largest crowds.
Ferrandez said he is open to other changes in the details of the pilot project, but not to scrapping it altogether.
“The definition of a pilot project is that it can be adapted,” he said.
Louis Hechter, owner of the Orbite hair salon, doesn’t have that sort of flexibility.
Located on Laurier St., at the foot of Mount Royal, he said he is already struggling to pay his $15,000 monthly lease and maintain a roster of 12 stylists.
But he fears that at least one-third of his clients who live on the opposite side of Mount Royal could decide to go elsewhere if they are denied ac- cess to Camillien-Houde Way.
“I don’t have a car. This is not the complaint of a jealous or frustrated driver. It’s an entrepreneur who’s looking at his business,” Hechter said.
“Every client counts. I’m not talking about profits right now. I’m trying to stay alive.”
Mount Royal has long incited passions. Looking out from its summit in 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier claimed the land that he stood above in the name of France. More than a century later, Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, one of the founders of the city, erected a cross at the top of the mountain, a steel version of which stands to this day.
In 1862, a Montreal council member and military officer, Alexander Stevenson, had a cannon dragged up the mountain and fired as part of a campaign to develop Mount Royal into a park by demonstrating that it was, indeed, accessible.
Twelve years later, Frederick Law Olmstead, an American landscape architect who had built New York’s Central Park as well as Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, got to work turning the mountain into a place people could enjoy up close rather than just admire from afar.
He saw his creation as a natural sanctuary, a reprieve from the chaos down below.
“It’s an urban oasis. We don’t have much of those,” said Suzanne Lareau, president of Vélo Québec, a cycling advocacy group. “We have one mountain in the heart of the city. We have to protect it and its users.”
She said blocking Camillien-Houde Way is more than a question of prio- ritizing cyclists and pedestrians over drivers. She sees it as the result of a more fundamental examination of how Montrealers use or abuse public spaces, about the room for cars in an increasingly dense city and about protecting the environment, given that transportation accounts for a large portion of greenhouse gas emissions.
But reaction to the proposed severing of the road has left her surprised and disappointed. Lareau said it confirms her belief that people can’t be trusted to turn their words into deeds.
“If we ask people to police themselves it won’t work. It’s harsh to say but the cities where we have succeeded in reducing the number of cars on the road are the ones where drastic measures have been enacted.”