You’ll hear everyone living in the suburbs around Montreal complain about the mayor, Valérie Plante, because she made certain streets pedestrian only, improved and added bike lanes, turned certain alleys into parks, which are all meant to reduce car traffic. But for the actual residents, the city has become so much better.
I really hope this can set an example for other Canadian cities that people can take the streets and our cities back from the car.
It makes such a big difference. Quality of life has really improved.
But it also helps to have neighborhoods like Hochelaga, the Plateau, Rosemont, where you have medium density housing with plexes and medium condo complexes around a shopping street with everything accessible within a 15 minute walk. I really love my neighborhood because of this.
I lived in the country most of my life and recently moved to a city. My city is far from walkable by any european sense of the term but I still manage the majority of my needs walking. I can’t believe how much better it is. I really get to take in my community more by not zipping by it at 50km/h. Most of my walks I even have a short conversation with a stranger. I specifically try to avoid the larger roads because the car noise really does take away from this experience.
That’s the best place you can live. If you can walk your entire neighborhood in 10 to 15 minutes walks and have access to a shops, bars, school, transit, groceries, pharmacy, it’s heaven.
Neighborhood without cars should be a thing. We should not reserve precious spaces for car parking, like, ever.
Street are for the people to enjoy and the children to play. Not for cars. There are exceptions of course (emergency for example) but that’s how I see it.
Cars really turned our city into junk. When you think about it, the best places are always the tight cities with small narrow street. It feels great to walk in those places.
I hope too, but I don’t think we’re lacking in examples. People will whatabout any amount of successful examples with the most absurd excuses. Vancouver has had many successes with bike infrastructure and yet the current mayor and park board are still against any meaningful project to advance biking infrastructure.
My mom hates Valerie Plante with a passion and rants about her whenever she is on TV. She’ll say stuff like “Denis Coderre was so much better.”
My mom lives on the South Shore and never sets foot in Montreal.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
Coderre thought he had ideas of grandeur that would ‘put Montréal on the map’ with all kinds of projects that would have benefited businesses first and foremost and actual residents and their quality of life were an afterthought. He acted like such a mononcle thinking it would connect with the millennials who were fed up with boomer mentality.
Plante actually put Montréal on the map by making it an example of a livable city in North America and putting the concerns and needs of the residents first. And it feels like the city hasn’t thrived this much since Jean Drapeau.
I really wish Toronto would follow Montreal’s lead.
It seems we’re so much more car-focussed than Montreal. We seem reluctant to give priority to pedestrians and public transit so as not to upset car owners.
We prioritize people who own things: cars, homes, businesses.
Well hoping Olivia can change that to an extent.
Seems? Toronto was deliberately made car dependent.
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We can only hope. In my opinion, Montréal is the most European like big city in North America. And Quebec’s unique culture isolates it from the rest of anglo-saxon North America.
The thing is, DDO’s culture isolates it from the Mile End just as much as Vancouver’s culture isolates it from Red Deer’s. I get the sentiment, but it’s a big province, and a big country with all kinds of different ways of going about things. As a Quebecker, I don’t see a situation that’s different from anywhere else in Canada. Save for the language, but that’s just a language. It definitely is nice to have nice things here, though. :)
