With Mount Royal plan, city proves it can compromise
Remember when traffic around Mount Royal was among the No. 1 hot-button issues in town? That was PRE-COVID-19.
Despite the fact few have raised the issue of late, the city, with surprisingly little fanfare, has just come up with what appears to be a decent compromise on traffic control along Camillienhoude Way. Which, of course, this means that cyclists, motorists and pedestrians all will be peeved. So it goes here.
There will be no complete closure of the roadway to motorists this summer. The only stoppage will take place Sunday mornings, from 7:30 a.m. to noon, along Camillien-houde Way, where cyclists, pedestrians, marathoners and amateur joggers alike will have the space to themselves. This will occur only from July
5 to Sept. 27, and there will still be access during this period to Mount Royal and its two cemeteries through Remembrance Rd.
Gone is that ludicrous, alternating one-way section with traffic lights near the lookout, which mostly succeeded in making cyclists, motorists and pedestrians alike gag on the resulting air pollution from idling vehicles waiting up to 15 minutes for the lights to change.
As many had suggested, the plan now is for a reduced speed limit and more speed bumps. Those reflective bollards will be in place, separating cyclists from motorists and preventing the latter from making illegal U-turns.
The initial city decision to cut back on Mount Royal traffic came after cyclist Clément Ouimet, 18, died in 2017 following a collision with the rear door of an SUV whose driver made an illegal U-turn on Camillien-houde.
These new measures are pretty much what the Office de consultation publique de Montréal had suggested last year in its 110-page report critical of the 2018 pilot project banning through traffic on the mountain. Although Mayor Valérie Plante believed the ban was a success, the public apparently felt otherwise. More than 35,000 people signed an online petition against the ban, while only 8,000 supported it.
In its report, the consultation group proposed turning the roadway into a slow-moving, scenic drive “to enhance the Mount Royal experience and the discovery of its landscape, natural and cultural heritage.”
On that note, perhaps the city could forever suspend Le Café Suspendu, which will never be confused for Central Park’s lush Tavern on the Green. Either that, or build a café more befitting this city’s esthetics. Ours looks like what happens when a couple of constructionally challenged guys on a bender burst into a Rénodépôt and make a plywood mess.
Since our mayor appears open to compromise, perhaps she can consider changing her mind on the future name of the REM station to be built in Griffintown by the end of 2023.
Plante is going with the name Griffintown–bernard-landry, which doesn’t exactly slip off the tongue easily, which defies historical logic and which is being viewed as a slap in the face to this city’s Irish community who largely inhabited Griffintown for over a century and many of whose members died of typhus here in the mid-19th century.
With no disrespect to late premier Landry and no desire to get into a political squabble, leading members of the Irish community would like the light-rail station simply to be called Griffintown to give the area the recognition it merits. Furthermore, they rightly feel that Landry was not connected to the area and its roots.
But, paraphrasing the words of the late/great Tom Petty, Plante won’t back down. She feels Landry merits equal REM billing for transforming part of Griffintown into the Cité du Multimédia.
Fergus Keyes, a director of the Montreal Irish Memorial Park Foundation, has instead proposed naming the Île-dessoeurs REM station for Landry, citing its proximity to the Cité du Multimédia.
Keyes also has a seemingly unlikely ally. Jean-pierre Jolivet, a long-serving former Parti Québécois MNA and longtime colleague of Landry, would also like to see the station just called Griffintown and the Île-dessoeurs REM named for Landry. This would honour the arrival of the Irish in Montreal as well as the work of Landry.
In a message to Plante posted on the Montreal Irish Memorial Park Foundation Facebook page, Jolivet says calling the station Griffintown–bernard-landry is committing “une énorme erreur envers la mémoire des Irlandais (es) et de Bernard Landry.”