Because he killed someone. People drive like maniacs all the time and people defend it and change the subject to blaming pedestrians on their phones. People do dangerous things in their cars all the time.
Take a look at any non congested highway and see how many speeding infractions their are; rarely unforced (at my last job I conducted about 1,000 speeding infractions per year, and recieved zero tickets).
I read of a group who rented out a parking lot to turn in to a temporary park b/c it was cheaper than renting land from the city, and they also wanted to demonstrate that parking was too cheap or a bad land use or something. It worked double the benefit for them
As another Montréal resident, this list is far from exclusive, and similar projects to each of those is happening in many of the burroughs.
We’ve also got lost of other projects that don’t even make the radar. My neighborhood had a road turn into a community center!. Plus Rue Island has gone through three or four vélorue transformations.
I look forward to seeing the resolution of the Gilbert-Dubé vélopath upgrades (Verdun bicycles PSC handshake.meme)
What a shame. Montreal is probably the closest we have to European style urbanism in North America. Sad to hear things are moving backwards but hopefully there is outcry.
The CAQ don’t care about Montreal. They will never be elected there. They represent a class of people that is in the minority in Montreal. There will be backlash, but if you’ve ever spoken to the average voter from outside of Montreal, they describe it as a hive of scum and villainy. Anything that goes to the city of Montreal is wasted in their opinion. I don’t think anyone will listen to the backlash out there.
I live in Lanaudière. My city is Montreal, I am just temporarily unhoused and had to move to a friend’s basement to shelter in until rent prices and salary meet again in the center. The shit I hear about Montreal from suburbanites is completely fucked.
The trend of treating SERVICES like they need to bring a profit rather than simply provide an essential service is extremely frustrating. At this rate, even the mail service will be whittled away until everything is privatized.
Roundabouts would like a word. Properly designed ones don’t need to dramatically lower speeds and are more efficient. And can easily be made pedestrian friendly. It doesn’t have to be either or.
It does lower speeds, you can’t just fly through a roundabout even if you’re going straight through. You can easily blast through a regular intersection at 100mph if you want.
They have higher throughput though, so it’s “faster” in that sense. Lower peak speeds, higher average speeds (as you’re not stopped for a long time).
That’s only if you are crossing through a roundabout, which I’ve never seen for pedestrians. Pedestrians have to walk around the roundabout as well, crossing the two way streets that leads up to it and still having to look both ways for cars leaving and entering the roundabout. This is usually helped by a median but a regular intersection can have a median as well to accomplish the same thing. These medians will also usually create a slip though like the author says in the video, which allows cars to take right turns at speed, if the roundabout is empty, without checking for the crosswalk they’re turning into.
But to be fair... putting down a single sign at the start of every red divider even if it's still under construction would have prevented most of that insanity.
Roundabouts require drivers to concentrate on multiple incoming streams of traffic to find a gap. Their attention is already divided, and they are far more likely to miss a pedestrian than at a regular intersection.
In roundabouts you only need to look in one direction of incoming cars. In a regular 4-way intersection you have to look in three directions. Your comment makes no sense to me.
You mainly need to be looking right (flipped for anyone who doesn’t drive on the left) pretty much all the roundabouts here that regularly have pedestrians will have triggered traffic lights or the pedestrian crossing at least a car length before the roundabout starts so if you’re entering a roundabout you’re almost always in front of where people will cross if they’re not just being dumb. Once you’re used to roundabouts they’re pretty formulaic and the biggest problem (for me anyway) on an unfamiliar roundabout is knowing which lane to be in, not the traffic already on the roundabout.
Can they though? What does a pedestrian friendly roundabout look like? The ones I’ve seen seem outright hostile.
I tried to find data but it doesn’t seem well studied. Since standard road design is so horrifically unsafe, unless it is substantially better it does not seem worth redesigning the intersection. I’d rather see that money go into something that has a proven benefit.
Crosswalk bridges are pretty hostile to pedestrians. They need to be at least 4 meters/12 ft high, to accommodate standard lorries. Nobody likes climbing high stairs on every crossing. Even worse for wheelchair users.
It doesn’t matter how much sense your ramp makes, it still needs enough height to allow trucks to pass under it. That’s a lot of height to gain. Any sensible ramp would be very long and take up a lot of space, and be very impractical to have to scale at every intersection.
We’ve already compromised too much by allowing cars in cities at all. If you are going to drive around innocent bystanders it needs to be done in a safe manner. Saving a minute on your commute is insignificant compared to a life.
Note that this meme is meant to make fun of NIMBYs who spread conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities being some evil communist plot to take away their freedom. The irony being that they often support the sorts of laws — restrictive zoning, parking minimums, Euclidean zoning, etc. — that essentially mandate car-dependent suburban sprawl.
Funny thing is, given the choice this lot would happily take a tower block in their back garden over someone taking their god given right to drive a chunk of metal around at 70mph
NIMBYism isn’t consistent, it’s just one aspect of a gamut of selfishness
Yeah, they don’t care about freedom, they care about having their personal preferences prioritized. All of conservatism can be summed up with selfishness or fear.
Uh. I’d walk, because places this packed with cars typically have a convenience store on every corner block.
This is such a stupid argument, lol
They don’t put roads like this to places with no infrastructure. They put it in places with lots of infrastructure, and they have to – because businesses and people in the area need talent from a wide swath of land to fill out roles in companies, etc.
The first high-speed rail system began operations in Japan in 1964, and is known as the Shinkansen The busiest high-speed rail service in the world, carrying more than 420,000 passengers on a typical weekday
– but your chart shows 90,000 per hour.
I’m gonna call bullshit. Biased source is still biased.
Let’s give you a shot here and say they only operate 12 hours out of the day, that means the busiest train in the WORLD only does 35,000 an hour. But the graph is claiming 60-90k per hour.
If I can point out that very OBVIOUS bias/flaw in the chart, what is the reason I should take it seriously at all?
That’s not the busiest train in the world, though. That’s the busiest HIGH-SPEED RAIL in the world. You’re ignoring all the metro systems and suburban rail lines in the world that serve the massive daily commute market.
Regardless, even the 35k per hour of that rail line is still an order of magnitude higher than cars on roads. Cars, no matter how you slice it, are wildly space-inefficient.
You're comparing maximum capacity to actual usage... weekday peak hours are like 80% of weekly passengers on most functional rail systems. Very common for the rest of the hours to run half schedules or smaller carriages because it's simply not necessary, but the network can handle it if required.
The chart isn’t about high-speed rail. High-speed lines often actually have lower capacity than lower-speed rail. For one, many suburban trains are bilevel, which can almost double the capacity per train, whereas high-speed lines often aren’t bilevel. Further, the higher speed doesn’t actually mean you can move more passengers per direction per hour; you’re still limited by how frequently you can run trains, as you need safe stopping distance between each train. Thus, high-speed rail can run faster, but it also needs much more space between trains. Typically the highest frequency train/metro routes can run trains every minute or two. A 2000-person capacity train every 2 minutes is equivalent to 60k passengers per direction per hour.
You ain’t walking it if there is a freeway between you and the store. Even in large cities, walkways that cross major highways are rare.
Perfect example right here where I am. The nearest Del Taco is within a walkable distance; but it’s on the otherside of the freeway. There is no walkable crossing to get over there. I have to drive, despite it being hella stupidly close.
As someone who experiences pain while walking essentially any distance over 100m, I don't want to walk for my groceries. But it's nice to have a store nearby. I really want an e-bike, but since I need a car and am already forced to pay for one, I can't really afford to have both.
Yeah, walking definitely isn’t suitable for everyone. What we need is dense communities with layered and diverse transit options. High walkability, abundant protected bike infrastructure, and accessible mass and local transit.
Walkability is a matter of urban design. Only 20% of the US lives somewhere rural; 80% live in a city, suburb, or small town. We’re taking about how the 80% shops.
Walkability is about lot size, density in general, mixed use development (putting houses near restaurants and shops), parking minimums, that sort of thing.
Walkable areas tend to be connected by public transit. Look at Amsterdam - to get to work, you might bike to the train station, take a train, then walk or bike to the office. You don’t have to walk clear across the city; public transit connects walkable spaces.
Compare that with American suburban design, where shops are put far from houses, on ugly-ass loud dangerous stroads with comically oversized parking lots. You don’t walk anywhere because anywhere you’d want to walk to is incredibly unpleasant to exist in. People will literally drive in their car to a walking path or a gym treadmill.
It also hurts, and since I'm not very active I don't have the physical stamina to bike distances much longer than a couple of km. I biked to work for a short while when I lived closer to my job but now I can't.
The point isn’t to force people to walk to get groceries. Rather, the point is that many cities have made it essentially impossible to get groceries on foot, even for those who want to. For example, Euclidean zoning in the US and Canada makes it literally illegal to build grocery stores (or any other commercial spaces) in residential areas, meaning grocery stores will be way too far from where most people live to be practical to walk to. Similarly, parking minimums mandate each store have a large, arbitrary amount of parking out front, even if the store owner doesn’t think they need anywhere that much parking. The effect of this is to needlessly spread out cities, yet again making it harder for people to walk to the store if they wish.
If you live in a place where it’s practical, where local laws don’t literally forbid it, walking to the grocery store in January genuinely isn’t bad in the slightest. I live in Montreal, which gets pretty frickin cold in January, and yet everybody and their grandmas walk to the grocery store in my neighborhood. Why? It’s a reasonably dense, walkable neighborhood with several grocery stores within a 5- to 10-minute walk of tons of people. I myself live a 5-minute walk from two grocery stores. For me, scraping ice and snow off a car just to get groceries would be 1000x more annoying than just popping on over to the store on foot.
Noni am correct. Explain to me how walking multiple miles in the snow is better than driving. Or do you want me to go to corner stores where everything is twice the price if a super market
fuckcars
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