Cataclaw

J'allais répondre mais cjb a tout dit!

En préservant la même densité d'habitants, il aurait été possible de reconfigurer le tout pour obtenir un style de développement beaucoup plus durable, accessible et dynamique.

Exemple:

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L'Ile des Soeurs, c'est la banlieue, on le sait. Bon. Mais même un exemple "à moitié" entre l'urbain et le "style Ile des Soeurs" aurait produit un meilleur résultat. Voici Victoria, BC.

C'est loin d'être le projet parfait, mais remarquez les pistes cylcables, les trottoirs larges, les commerces au RDC, l'existence d'une trame urbaine, etc.

Voici un autre angle

Nettement plus beau que le rendu.

Merci Steve

Steve, j'adore faire le tour de tout ces petits projets que tu nous présentes.

Merci pour tes scoop, et meci pour tes photos!

En termes d'urbanisme, c'est un échec total.

En termes d'architecture, j'adore!

Les résidents du Lowney n'iront pas là, mais ceux des Jardins Windsor, peut-être. À une distance de de 180m et même pas 2 minutes de marche, il faut avouer que c'est proche.

Mais bon. Anyway... cette discussion est interessante mais le projet est déjà en marche et on on sais déjà ce qu'on va obtenir, donc inutile de trop s'en faire.

C'est quand même un très beau projet et j'ai bien hate de le voir monter!

Très vrai, la Cage aux sports est très tranquille sauf les soirs de match. En fait le coin au complet, je dirais d'atwater jusqu'à Stanley, de R-L jusqu'à la Gauchetière (et plus bas), c'est hyper tranquille pour le commerce.

J'avoue que c'est tranquille en ce moment.

Espérons que les 4 tours à condo (Icone, CH, Rocabella, Avenue) avec leurs ~200 étages d'unités résidentielles* vont amener des gens de plus dans le quartier et aider un peu avec l'animation!

(*en comptant les deux tours du Roccabella)

J'aime bien l'ambition de Broccolini, mais s'il veut que sa tour soit une figure emblématique.. va falloir qu'elle se démarque. Avec le 1250 juste à côté, ça risque d'être difficile. Montez ça à 70 étages et 250m et on jasera ;)

Ce coin je le connais depuis 4 ans, et sérieusement, c'est mort solide. Ce n'est pas une rue à destination, ni de passage.

 

Je ne trouve pas l'idée d'automatiquement mettre du commerce au RDC de n'importe quelle tour superbe,... en fait, ce n'est pas rentable pour les commerçants, il y aurais trop d'offres, pas assez de clients.

 

(Même à Manhattan, toutes les tours n'ont pas du commerce au RDC, et c'est hyper dense).

Je sais, mais on a ici un coin destiné au changement et au développement. D'ici 20 ans, on ne reconnaitra pas le secteur. Ca vaut la peine d'être un peu avantgardiste et prévoir les choses.

Mais anyway, le site en question est à 10 mètres du Centre Bell. J'ai de la misère à croire qu'un restaurant à cet endroit ne serait pas rentable.

J'avoue sincèrement que ce n'est pas la fin du monde. La tour Windsor, je l'accepte quand même avec les bras ouverts. C'est un très beau projet! On peut pas toujours avoir la mixité verticale, mais au moins le secteur a une bonne mixité horizontale. (Condos, bureaux, commerces, institutions, parcs, transports, etc.)

JE travaille dans le domaine du détail depuis plus de 25 ans, et je pourrais te dire que personne qui a une tête sur les épaules ne louerais un espace de détail sur une rue comme celle la, c'est désert parce que le type de bâtiment est seulement bureau et gare de transport ou centre Bell, pour que ça soit rentable, il faudrait que la tour soit situer sur René Levesque si de multiple tour résidentielles sont construites et encore la, pas sur, car pas une destination avant 5 a 10 ans au moins. Les gens vont sur des rues comme ste-Catherine ou près , mais pas sur St-Antoine, déjà Notre-Dame dans le vieux près de Mc Gill est presque désertique pour que ça soit rentable et il y des tonnes de bureaux et résidents a proximité, alors, en plein milieu de nowhereland! Good luck!

Your post in symptomatic of the single-use mentality that has existed since the modernist era. Unfortunately, if you want to break free, you have to start somewhere. I have a very hard time believing a site close to the train station, Bell Center, and soon-to-be forest of residential towers all around, could not support a single floor of retail or other commercial activity. A restaurant could easily work at this location. Come on. Let's get real.

Bref, on peut faire mieux, et on doit exiger mieux.

Tout ça me fait penser un peu aux compétitions d'hauteur entre la tour CIBC et la PVM, le Chrysler Building et le Empire State Building, etc.

Dire qu'il y a 5 ans, on se réjouissait du Concorde avec ses 17 étages... les temps changent!

That's what they are doing, keeping part of the Thursday's Facade(where the terrasses are) then a new entrance with a more modern design, then keeping the exising redstone building, then a new modern building where the havana cafe and empty lot ares, varying details, materials, types and architectures

I know, I actually found some section views on the city's web site and took a closer look. (See previous page for images)

I edited my post but you responded to it before

Yeah, I'm feeling ok with this project now. It's a huge investment so I'm thinking the materials used will be of a high quality.

Finalement, c'est pas si pire... selon le plan obtenu sur le site de la ville, les édifices sur le côté Crescent seront tous des restos et bars.

Bon, je suis rassuré en regardant les rendus sur le site de la ville... c'est pas si mal!

Le projet de 10 voies, c'est 2 pour le transport en commun et 8 pour les véhicules. Ce n'est pas la même chose.

Moi je propose 6 voies pour les véhicules, 4 pairs de rails pour un train léger, et une piste multi-fonctionnelle pour piétons et cyclistes.

Ce qu'il faut comprendre c'est que la capacité de transporter des gens dépend de l'utilité des voies.

Un pont qui ne fait que 2 voies de large, utilisé pour le transport en commun, a une capacité supérieure a un pont qui fait 8 voies de large (pour véhicules)! C'est quelque chose!

Here is an image showing the cross-sectional configurations of various New York City bridges over time. All of these bridges were reconfigured to accomodate cars. We see that New York City's bridges used to carry a lot more people when the lanes were used for subway tracks and street cars. Today, we've reduced the total capacity of NYC's bridges and created a nightmare of car congestion. Fortunately, there is growing pressure to reverse some of the changes and replace some vehicule lanes with subway tracks once again. Let's hope it happens!

Conclusion: we simply cannot afford to waste money on more vehicle lanes than the Champlain Bridge has now. It's too costly, it's too inefficient, it's too harmful to our economy and our environment. Six is just fine. Adding 4 pairs of light rail tracks would quadruple the capacity of the bridge.

Source: http://www.streetfilms.org/rethinking-the-automobile-with-mark-gorton/

The building looks nice, but single-use office buildings don't excite me. Mixed-use would be much, much better, especially around the Bell Center like that.

We really need to tighten our zoning laws and require that the first floor to be retail.

Super ces photos, Dabruk!

Merci! J'aime surtout la première!

1. To show you how easy it is to find data about this, I pulled up the very first study I found on Google in just 10 seconds. Here is a study that looked at 70 metropolitan areas in the USA (including many dense and urban cities that ressemble Montreal such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.)

Here we see that cities that increased their lane-miles significantly did not alleviate congestion any more than cities that increased their lane-miles marginally.

This reflects the phenomenon that I like to call the "balloon effect": urban highway capacity has a tendency to "max out" and the number of vehicles, over the aggregate, will always match the given capacity.

http://www.daclarke.org/AltTrans/analysis.html

2. Now, let me explain a bit about how we model transportation. I talk a lot about this, but I think it's fair If I describe it in better detail. Transportation modelling decades ago looked something like this:

Step 1, Generate trip origins. Often, this is done using regression analysis.

Step 2, Generate trip destinations using various techniques, usually a gravity model. This produces an origin-destination matrix.

Step 3, Split the modes. Usually using discrete logit models, separate the trips between X desired modes and create separate matrices.

Step 4, Assign the trips to the approprate networks and overlay the matrices. There are different algorithms and methods to do this. Some are stochastic and others are deterministic. Some consider user equillibrium and others consider social equillibrum. The best models use balanced approaches that mimic real-life conditions quite accurately.

Sometimes time-flow relationships are used. We call these volume delay functions (VDFs)

Iterative approaches exist such as MSA (successive averages) which determines an initial set of current link costs (free flow) and then builds a set of minimum cost paths based on current costs, n=n+1

Using MSA, you get something like this (sorry for the poor scan, taken from my University references)

There are a whole bunch of methods with their pros and cons. The toolbox is large.

So for generations, transportation modelling did not concern itself with the impact of system performance on land use. Today, we have a better understanding of the mathematical relationships between where people live, where people work, the routes they take, the perforamance of those routes, and the growth and development that occurs around us.

Today, we use an integrated approach that looks like this:

3. Another thing to remember is that adding new lanes to Champlain won't just increase congestion on Champlain, but it will increase congestion on neighboring roads and highways too. I'm not sure our Decarie expressway can handle any more congestion. Here's an example I did a while back showing how additional lanes on Autoroute 40 would increase destination density and add to congestion not just on A-40 itself, but on A-520, A-20, A-13, A-20, Rte-138, A-10, A-15, etc.

What this map shows is that the number of destinations decreases in outlying areas and increases in town along the A-40. This is because people that live in the west can now comfortably (at least at first) commute to the city for their shopping needs, for employment, etc. As such, destinations decrease in the west and increase in the city. This doesn't mean we're attracting new people to the city at the expense of the suburbs, quite the contrary, as the slight gain in inner-city activity will be offset by the exodus of people to the areas in red. People will want to live in the red areas because they can now commute to the city easily (at first). That will drive away a large number of businesses to those red areas, more than enough to compensate for the increased activity in the green areas. So that's what happens initially. Then, when congestion returns, not only does the activity in the city decrease due to congestion, but now we're stuck with all this suburban sprawl in the west, businesses that left the city in favor of the suburbs in the west, and a giant infrastructure maintenance bill.

MORE LANES, IT JUST DOESN'T WORK!

We're very lucky in Montreal. We have Origin-Destination surveys every 5 years that provide us with very rich disaggregate data, some of the best in the world! We even have our own software designed to carry out OD surveys (thanks to Poly UdeM) and we have some of the most precise models on the planet.

Here's a 2003 study that looked at transportation.

http://www.ccmm.qc.ca/documents/memoires/2004_2005/BTMM_PublicTransit_study.pdf

Here's MADITUC, our very own software designed at Polytechnique in Montreal.

http://www.madituc.polymtl.ca/

CONCLUSION:

Bref, tout ça pour vous dire que les transports, c'est un sujet fortement étudié! Quand je vous dis qu'un nouveau pont Champlain à 10 voies serait congestionné de nouveau dans 2 à 5 ans (ou moins!!) ce n'est pas tiré de l'air.

Il faut à tout prix prioriser le transport en commun sur le nouveau pont avec 2 à 4 pairs rails de SLR, et minimiser l'effet d'étalement et de congestion avec 6 voies routières, pas plus et pas moins.

Multiplier les voies à 10, ça nous couterait approximativement 150$millions par année (couts de congestion seulement, sans compter tout le reste!), soit l'équivalent d'une station de métro par année.

C'est un choix qu'on peut faire. C'est le temps de faire le bon choix.

Parce que bon

 

Si on suit ton raisonnement, à quoi ça va servir d'avoir un nouveau pont Champlain s'il va être congestionner. Aussi bien le détruire et puis voila ... moins de congestion !

Arrêtes de voir ça en noir-ou-blanc. Ce n'est pas une question de "tout-ou-rien". Si on détruit tout les ponts, comment va on faire pour se rendre sur l'ile?

Oui, le nouveau pont Champlain va être congestionné. Il faut le reconstruire avec du TEC pour 1) éviter que le pont tombe et des gens meurent, et 2) prioriser le TEC.

Peu importe ce qu'on fait, le pont Champlain va être congestionné, donc il faut penser à d'autres solutions, et la solution, c'est le TEC.

4 pairs de rails, 1 piste multi-fonctionnelle pour piétons et cyclistes, et 6 voies pour les véhicules. Let's go!

à ce que je sache, le pont de la 25 n'est pas sur la rive sud ? m'aurais t'on mentit !

Justement, l'effet d'embouteillage est nettement plus prononcé sur la rive sud. Ca va prendre encore moins de temps pour atteindre la congestion de nouveau sur un futur pont Champlain.

Donc, si l'A-25 est déjà congestionnée, un nouveau pont Champlain à 10 voies... imagines! Comment peut tu croire que ça va prendre 50 ans? C'est franchement ridicule. 50 semaines, peut-être.

Tant qu'à suivre le raisonnement à son maximum, aussi bien détruire tout les ponts reliant la rive sud à Montréal, on va régler un gros paquet de congestion.

JE ne suis pas de mauvaise fois, je ne suis que le raisonnement. Oui si on ajoute 2 voies de plus en 50 ans de circulation, elle seront remplit. mais en même temps, 2 voies en 50 ans simonac...

Ce n'est pas 50 ans... c'est 5 ans ou moins. Bordel, le nouveau pont de la 25 connait deja de la congestion!

Sortez de votre bulle!

I'm curious to know what your opinion of the 401 in Greater Toronto as opposed to the Met, do you consider the Met wide enough and/or the 401 too sprawly? Just wondering.

Sure montréaliste. Yes, the 401 is far too wide. The 401 in Toronto has become the poster child for how adding lanes doesn't solve congestion, It just makes it worse. The Met in Montreal is just fine as it is. It doesn't need more lanes.

Imagine If you could go back in time. Imagine that it's 1980 and you decide to add lanes to the Met over the next 30 years until 2010. By 2010, the Met has 16+ lanes, just like the 401 in Toronto. By 2010, you would find that the highway is still just as congested as ever, and that low-density suburban development stretches dozens of kilometers past the edges we're familiar with, in all directions. Imagine being in that scenario, and starting a campaign to reduce the lanes from 16 to 12, or even tear down the highway completely. Unthinkable, right? Where would all those cars go? Well, those only got there in the first place because we made so many accomodations for them. Had we not, we would not have had so many. It's the same with Champlain. If we build a massive bridge, we will induce a massive number of automobile trips.

The answer is not to go down the path of "capacity increasing". It's a slippery slope that leads to the 401 in Toronto. Our highways are fine at 6 lanes total and that's how it should stay.

Cataclaw, Je comprends ton point sur le Pont et que même si nous contruisons un nouveau pont avec 10 voies, qu'il sera congestioné d'ici 5 ans. J'ai pris des cours d'urbanisme à Concordia moi aussi. mais dans chacun des cas qui ont été étudié, on parlait de ville américaines. Des villes ou la vste majorité des gens n'utilisent pas le transport en commun.

Habsfan, le chiffre de 5 ans c'est la moyenne Canadienne pour les projets de construction ou d'agrandissement dans les grandes villes. Les Américains n'ont rien à voir avec ça (en fait, leur chiffre à eux est encore plus bas que ça)

Relis cette portion de mon post:

When I said "5 years or less" i'm not just making an educated guess, I'm giving you a very reasonable approximation based on existing data provided by the Montreal 2008 Origin-Destination survey, transit simulations done by various sources, and aggregate empyrical data obtained from observation over the last 60 years. In fact, due to the choke-point nature of bridges (and the absence of alternate routes), an implict multiplier effect inevitably comes into play. Because transportation is a dynamic system, and because the number of river crossings are few and far between, the actual congestion time for a new Champlain Bridge might be as little as 18-36 months. The 5 year estimate is actually quite conservative.

If you studied transportation and understand induced demand, I don't see how you can be in favor of increasing the number of lanes to 10, since it will only increase total congestion along with suburban sprawl. This has been observed for decades now. It is so well understood that entire books have been written on the topic. Even in European and Asian cities that have good public transit, the phenomenon occurs. One of the reasons we have a nice dense city that tourists love is because we stopped building highways and bridges years ago. (Note: I still support building more river crossings, just not car-only ones.) Anyway, I'll see If i can gather up all the statistics, research and data I can find on this topic to back up my point. I really think this is a matter of fact. If we build this new bridge with more lanes, we will pay a price for it down the road.

I know it's crazy counter-intuitive, I know it's a weird backwards-seeming concept, and I know it makes people's heads explode sometimes because it seems to unbelievable, but it's actually.. a demonstrable, observable fact. If we build more lanes, we increase congestion in under 5 years. And we'll be stuck with the new congestion and sprawl that comes with it, not to mention the costs of maintenance, repair, and hundreds of millions of dollars in foregone revenue due to the inefficiencies of low density promulgated by automobile-induced sprawl.

Guys, we got to detatch ourselves from our emotions. I get it, Maybachs and Mustangs are cool.. I have a car too that I drive on occasion. Seriously, It can be fun, and I get that. But we have to throw away our pre-conceived notions about automobile transportation and start looking at the facts and 60 years of science. Five years ago my computer desktop background was a sweet picture of a Dodge Viper RT10. Honestly. I get it. But times have changed, and this isn't 1960 anymore. We've learned new things about transportation, we've had time to study its effects, and we've learned from other parts of the world. Car culture is so deeply rooted in our collective psyche that our love for automobile transportation blinds us to the facts sometimes. It becomes an emotional response whenever somebody wants to take away an inch from cars. "HOW DARE YOU, YOU ANTI-CAR HIPPY!" It is truly a viseral and emotional reaction. Yet, if we take the time to look at empyrical data, decades of studies, academic journals and new developments, we start to see that maybe it's not so crazy after all. I just wish we would throw away the emotional knee-jerk response we have and start embracing reason, even if the truth sometimes hurts a little bit. And it does hurt a little bit, I admit, but it offers a world of benefits in exchange. We have to make choices. So let's make the right choices, for our economy, for society and for the environment.

(Habsfan: for the record the last paragraph doesn't really apply to you. I was just making a general rant. I know you, you're a really rational guy. But still, I think we're all collectively guilty of this way of thinking.)

(P.S. I'm looking at a model run I did 6 months ago in TransCAD where I modelled the effects of adding 1 lane to Highway 40 in the West Island, from Decarie to the Ontario border. Trips went up 40%, and the demand and stress on the network skyrocketed. I'll see If I can find the maps..)

I know I'm going to get flamed so bad once again for speaking up.. but have at it. Somebody's gotta do this

C'est un problème de politique et de zonage. À long terme, je suis confiant que va bien s'en sortir.

Pas mal, pas mal.

Merci ILuvMTL!

Ouch.

En espérant que les deux projets ne perdent pas trop de temps avec ça..

I wish it was this cheap. These are anti-car propaganda numbers. Maybe 8-10 stations max. Maybe.

That's flat out wrong. Using inexpensive cut-and-cover methods for tunnels under large arterial roads, and by building surface light-rail and elevated segments wherever necessary, we can easy build 20+ stations, if not more. The Laval metro extension cost 150$/million per kilometer using techniques due to the difficult conditions. Even under those horribly pessimistic conditions, we could add more than 20 stations of subway/light-rail/elevated rail. If you consider that light rail can cost as little as 30$/million per kilometer, we see that the numbers I posted are not only correct, but very conservative indeed.

The rest of your numbers are highly suspect also. Where do you come up with these numbers? How can 1 dollar invested in a new highway not generate a huge amount of return with the freely flowing trucks it will create?

Because the modest economic returns are offset by huge negative externalities (high cost of maintenance, repaving, repair, snow removal, pollution, revenues lost to sprawl and other effects, etc.)

How can a student/unemployed/poor person (majority of public transport users) create more economic spinoffs? I would really like to know that.

Because transit development generates positive externalities (higher density which leads to greater returns on public and private investments, infrastructure costs, services, etc.) It allows people to save a lot of money on transportation costs. That money is then spent on consumption instead, which powers the economy and creates jobs. (Annual price tag for owning an automobile in Quebec, according to CAA, is around 10,000$/year, including gasoline, insurance, license plates, maintenance and repairs, driver's license, vehicule depreciation, etc. The average transit-user spends around 1,200$-1,800$/year on transportation.)

Also, the cost of pedestrian, cyclist and transit improvements are more labor-intensive. That puts more investment dollars in the pockets of workers and consumers who can then spend it and power the economy. Painting a new bicycle lane along a stretch of road entails that a smaller percentage of the total investment be spent on materiels, and a larger percentage of the investment to be spent on worker salaries. Conversely, a greater percentage of the cost of building a highway overpass is spent on raw materiels instead of wages. Although some of the losses are recouped from the fact that other workers receive contracts to create the materiels, it is still far less efficient because only a percentage of that money in turn goes to wages. In normative microeconomics, the former strategy is always better than the latter, thus, more labor-intensive investments such as pedestrian, transit and cycling improvements are more stimulative than material-intensive investments such as roads.

Also, I agree that eventually a ten lane bridge would inevitably become congested, but definately not 5 years or less! I would say more likely 10-15 years. But I agree it will happen.

I'm an urban planner who specializes in transportation, with a particular interest in transportation modelling using GIS (geographic information systems) tools such as TransCAD.

When I said "5 years or less" i'm not just making an educated guess, I'm giving you a very reasonable approximation based on existing data provided by the Montreal 2008 Origin-Destination survey, transit simulations done by various sources, and aggregate empyrical data obtained from observation over the last 60 years. In fact, due to the choke-point nature of bridges (and the absence of alternate routes), an implict multiplier effect inevitably comes into play. Because transportation is a dynamic system, and because the number of river crossings are few and far between, the actual congestion time for a new Champlain Bridge might be as little as 18-36 months. The 5 year estimate is actually quite conservative.

I also agree that a mix of an effective, logical highway system (worthy of a city our size) with efficient public transport is the only way out of traffic hell.

I agree with you there. A mix is the only way to go. An even 33-33-33 percent mode-split between cars, transit, and pedestrians/cyclists would be ideal in our case. Unfortunately, we're a long way from that. In many parts of the CMA, automobiles still account for over 90% of all trips.

No they didn't. They are actually building more elsewhere in the same region. (double-decker highways, new bridges, tunnels)

That's wrong. San Francisco has an official moratorium on new highway construction in the city. New York has similar provisions. No new large-scale car-only infrastructure projects are being built in the urban areas within these agglomerations. In some cases, there is some new activity on the periphery, but the trend is definitely not rampant out-of-control freeway construction like we have here in Quebec right now (Autoroutes 5, 50, 25, 30, 35, 70, 80, 85, 19, 20, 410, 73 and 175). The bottom line is that within the Montreal context, some high speed road infrastructure is necessary and we need it, but it has to make sense. Example: It can be argued that A-30 makes sense. The Bonaventure, on the other hand, should never have been built at all.