amaist

Perfect is the enemy of good and completed. Yes, burying it under Wellington with a station would be awesome. But much more expensive and much more difficult to get done in a reasonable amount of time. If at all. The original plan had a station under the Peel Basin. Very cool but extremely difficult to execute. And any small mistake there under all that water would have threatened the functionality of the whole system in the future.

French is not my strongest language. But I can understand enough to know it will very likely never happen. With the potential costs and complexities it might not be worth the trouble.

I bring up the incompatibility of transponders on A25 and A30 as direct evidence that MTQ is one of the more incompetent transport ministries in North America. Not to mention that EZ Pass is now accepted all the way from Maine to Florida. While costing exactly ZERO dollars in monthly fees unlike the A25 one. Plus an EZ Pass transponder is portable between cars and you can even get away with not having it in the car and just register the plate with EZ Pass to get the EZ Pass rate. Someone can argue that the A25 highway robbery is done by a private company. Yes, this is true. But it's the MTQ that allowed them to operate like that. MTQ should be on our side, no? Incompetence or corruption? A bit of both? Getting back to the A30 extension. I don't know if the Chateauguay to Vaudreuil extension was a smash hit but the Candiac to Chateauguay one is definitely paying off. Saved me from numerous trips over the island of Montreal and made St Constant and Chateauguay accessible. I did use the Western bit a few times and it was a very pleasant drive compared to dodging big rigs on the 40 or getting stuffed before the 20/13 interchange. The toll wasn't a big deal if you keep your eyes up and move further to the right. I learned those skills on the old Garden State Parkway and NJ Turnpike toll plazas. The A30 toll plaza is just a pleasant diversion in comparison.

https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/grand-montreal/2022-08-04/refection-du-tunnel-la-fontaine/900-millions-de-plus-et-ferme-plus-longtemps.php

This is a crude screenshot of Munich's Ostbahnhof. 5 minutes from the central station. Trains about every minute (many lines converge here). It's not pretty at all. But it worked amazing. Just make sure to figure out the platform with the next train to the center. They actually wanted to make the REM at Lachine canal go as a tunnel initially. Then realized the cost would be absurd, time to build even longer. Plus it would have butchered Griffintown at the point where it surfaces cutting the area from Old Montreal even more. I will take functional and working sooner over pretty and maybe working eventually any day. With the current design my kids will get to experience freedom as teenagers able to quickly move in and out of the city center. Not just being prisoners of suburbia without cars of their own.

You are correct that is much more difficult to convert existing infrastructure to new technology. I am sure that was well understood by the people making that choice. The other choice to build from scratch had it's own issues that are different. Did they have the funding and the political will to acquire space for a new path? Building another tunnel? Judging by the slow progress of the much smaller airport tunnel that approach also has its difficulties. It's quite possible they underestimated the degree of difficulty to convert the Mount Royal tunnel for REM use. I also suspect it's the rest of us who got seduced by the idea that converting existing structures should be relatively easy. CDPQi presentations are always very optimistic. Has anyone ever seen a PowerPoint that is not optimistic? From any government/corporate entity?

My original impression was that they were never planning to do full testing on the new SdC bridge before launching service. CDPQ Infra explicitly said that the portion before the bridge from Brossard to Panama will be the one where they will test for a year. Which is exactly what they are doing now. Some nice low temperature conditions right now for the trials. The critical bits to test in winter are power delivery from the overhead wires, reliable operation of doors, effect of snow cover on movement, etc. Those can be tested on the existing test track. Which aspects need to be tested specifically on the new bridge in winter?

I suspect there was a lot more to it than just installing the beams. That spot is over a complex existing railroad setup. There is a rail underpass under the main track that joins the spur from the Old Port into the overall rail network. Most likely it took a lot of preparatory work to allow the cranes and the rest to be there without disrupting rail operations. Once everything was in place installing the beams was easy. I don't expect it to take too long for that section to catch up to the rest of the structure if it goes according to their plan. This is a notable milestone. For the first time one can walk all the way from Brossard station to Gare Central station along the path of the rail. Yes, I realize there is no deck on the beams as of yet but they are wide enough to walk on. Next milestone is continuous rail on that section. Then full electrification.

My point was that the same exact people complaining about aesthetics will complain about the extra cost if the decision was made to upgrade aesthetics. They will also be extremely displeased with the actual design choices. Lifetime complainers. Nothing ever will be good enough for them and they keep spreading their misery on all of us. The best approach is to mostly ignore them or occasionally call out their BS when their negativity completely obliterates their ability to reason.

The article is deceptive. Using a narrow angle shot along the direction of the track vs a wide angle rendering of the project in a different location to show how CDPQ Infra was somehow deceptive. Maybe the system could be made to look better. But at what cost? Will the same people be happy with an extra $1 Billion in cost? I fully expect the same exact journalists writing articles on how it was very wasteful to go for the "pretty" approach if such a choice were to be made. Their goal is to generate attention to their publication.

I just rode a Bixi up and down rebuilt Peel yesterday. Between Notre Dame and Rene Levesque. Very Copenhagen. I approve. It was not crowded during early afternoon so I can't judge how it's going to be if there are a lot of pedestrians on the sidewalk. It did not seem that constrained to me. I think providing decent spacing for bicycles is good for overall spacing. There is a very high variance of speeds and having room to avoid each other is welcome. As for wandering pedestrians, it will take some time for people to learn. The small level differences between road/bike/pedestrian sections are already much better than just having some painted lines. People notice physical features much better than painted/written instructions. Peel Street car capacity will definitely be lower than before but it is mitigated a bit by expanding the road to allow for turning lanes and such. Even before the reconstruction nobody should have expected to get through that area quickly. I actually took the Bixi because I was going to lunch from Old Montreal to Downtown. I realized that trying to find a place to stuff my car around Peel/St. Catherine was foolish. Took the electric Bixi going up. 10 minutes and $1.00 on top of my yearly membership. Infinitely better experience. The new Peel Street bike path made it a no-brainer. The old configuration was only usable by bike messengers and people who wanted to be proven to have followed all the rules of the road but still dead after a truck ran them over.

I used to think like that. To the most part it is true that most politicians don't try to seriously follow through on their most ridiculous promises. Sadly some do. It's not always obvious which ones will do that. If you repeat an idea frequently for a long enough period of time it eventually becomes normal to a large number of people. That's how crazy and dangerous ideas infect us. I am not saying covering up Decarie Expressway is a dangerous idea. It does seem like a waste of time and money to me, though. The disruption that project will cause will be even more painful to the whole city than the monetary cost. I already call it the Decarie Parking Lot. With this project over several years people better learn how to navigate surface streets in the area to get anywhere. Yes, it's a noisy nuisance. But that was already known for generations. There are other areas of Montreal that can use some investment to become more pleasant to live in. With much better returns per million spent.

I suspect it is actually easier to fix than the super bean on the old bridge. Steel is easy to cut and weld, bolt, rivet etc. Look at the work on the Mercier Bridge or PJC. They keep going through different steel bits without very serious disruptions to traffic. The old bridge needed whole spans replaced as a single piece. It would require shutting it down for a serious amount of time (possibly a couple weeks or a month) to do each span. That's what pushed the feds into building a brand new bridge.

A huge number of stations in Moscow and St Petersburg, Russia have been open longer than all Montreal stations. Most look very nice and many are a tourist attraction in and of themselves. It's a matter of will and allocation of resources by those in charge. Time is not relevant.

Multiple conflicting goals prevent that. Notice how the section going up from St Jacques begins as one lane and splits into two lanes. The aim is to provide as much space as possible to bicycles and pedestrians. So we either make it even more hellish for the drivers and make it all a single lane or forget about making things better for pedestrians and cyclists. The alignment does makes sense if we had a culture of driving where people wouldn't take pride in their ineptitude as drivers. The most basic rule of staying to the right most side of the road would allow this intersection to function well even when covered in snow. But people often can't be bothered with such trivialities like watching well ahead and staying to the right and follow the alignment of the road. And don't worry, even if they followed your recommendations it would still be a disaster. Once you make something idiot proof nature comes up with a better idiot.