LindbergMTL

Alors c est GO?

February 20, 2009 Slice of Stimulus Package Will Go to Faster Trains By MICHAEL COOPER It may be the longest train delay in history: more than 40 years after the first bullet trains zipped through Japan, the United States still lacks true high-speed rail. And despite the record $8 billion investment in high-speed rail added at the last minute to the new economic stimulus package, that may not change any time soon. That money will not be enough to pay for a single bullet train, transportation experts say. And by the time the $8 billion gets divided among the 11 regions across the country that the government has designated as high-speed rail corridors, they say, it is unlikely to do much beyond paying for long-delayed improvements to passenger lines, and making a modest investment in California’s plan for a true bullet train. In the short term, the money — inserted at the 11th hour by the White House — could put people to work improving tracks, crossings and signal systems. That could help more trains reach speeds of 90 to 110 miles per hour, which is much faster than they currently go. It is much slower, however, than high-speed trains elsewhere, like the 180 m.p.h. of the newest Japanese bullet train. (The Acela trains on the East Coast are capable of 150 m.p.h., but average around half that.) To some longtime proponents of high-speed rail who have watched with envy as other countries built ever-faster trains, failing to build a world-class high-speed train now would represent a tremendous missed opportunity to lure drivers off choked roads and fliers away from long delays at airports. “What are we trying to achieve?” asked Joseph Vranich, a rail expert who wrote “Supertrains” (St. Martin’s Press, 1991). “If we really wanted to have high-speed rail in this country, and have it be a great success, then what we would do is concentrate the funds on the New York-Washington corridor, which is the top corridor in the country.” Mr. Vranich warned that spreading the money around the country could dilute its power to build a true high-speed system, and he predicted that making incremental improvements to the speeds of trains around the country would not be enough to get large numbers of people to stop flying. Even with full financing, it could take a decade or more to build a bullet train line. The state now closest to building a true high-speed system is California, where voters approved borrowing $9 billion last fall to begin building a train that can go faster than 220 m.p.h. “The California high-speed rail project is the only genuine pending project,” said Judge Quentin L. Kopp, the chairman of the California High-Speed Rail Authority. Mr. Kopp has outlined plans to spend up to $2 billion of the stimulus money by the deadline of 2012 — one-quarter of the available federal money, but only a small part of the $45 billion the project is expected to cost. Many other states also have big plans. North Carolina, which is part of the Southeast High-Speed Rail Corridor, will seek some of the stimulus money to speed rail service between Charlotte and Washington. Wisconsin wants to use some of it on a line linking Madison and Chicago, hoping to have trains running up to 110 m.p.h. Officials in Alabama want to be on a faster line connecting Atlanta and New Orleans. Many rail advocates said that it would make sense to move to higher-speed rail before building true high-speed rail, and that getting the nation’s long-neglected rail system into working order could lay the foundation for future high-speed projects. “You’ve got to walk before you can run, and we’ve just been crawling up to now,” said Ross B. Capon, the president of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, an advocacy group for riders. Many passenger trains run on tracks owned by freight companies, and they are slowed on long stretches of single track, where trains must pull onto sidings so others can pass. Federal transportation officials said that they were still drawing up guidelines for how the money would be spent, and cautioned that it was too early to predict what they would do. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told reporters in Washington this week that he believed high-speed rail would be President Obama’s transportation priority. Mr. LaHood said the department had recently given the White House a memorandum describing plans for high-speed rail in “at least six corridors” across the country. But people who were excited by that prospect may be surprised to hear that the federal government defines “high speed” as much slower than other countries do. A diesel train in the United States that can go 90 m.p.h. is still considered high-speed under the government’s definition. So some projects financed by the bill may simply get intercity passenger rail back to where it was earlier in the 20th century, rather than closer to the futuristic vision of the trains of Europe and Asia, like the magnetic levitation, or maglev, train that whisks passengers from Shanghai to its airport 19 miles away in seven minutes, attaining a speed of 259 m.p.h. The Acela is the United States’ fastest train. But because the tracks it runs on are curvy, and are shared with many other trains, it is only able to reach its top speed of 150 m.p.h. on about 35 miles of track in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Its average speed is 84 m.p.h. between New York and Washington. Still, Amtrak has captured 62 percent of the combined air and rail market between New York and Washington, company officials said. High-speed rail has a long, tortured history in the United States, going back to 1965, when Congress passed the High-Speed Ground Transportation Act. Since then, it has been proposed by many governors and studied in countless plans, always holding out the promise of catching up with other countries. Voters in Florida passed a constitutional amendment requiring the state to build a high-speed rail system, only to repeal it a few years later after several prominent businesses, along with Jeb Bush, who was then the governor, complained of its expense. C. C. Dockery, who sponsored the campaign for the amendment, said in an interview that he and the other members of the Florida High-Speed Rail Authority were planning to meet late this month to discuss how to go about seeking some of the federal money. “It would be a huge benefit to Florida,” Mr. Dockery said. Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/us/20rail.html?_r=1&hp

La capacité à l'auto-flagellation sur ce site ne cesse de me surprendre. Tant d'auto-destruction! A travers mon travail à la télévision depuis 20 ans, je croise des leaders dans pleins de domaines, des leaders de classe mondiale, qui vivent et investissent toute leur énergie et aiment cette ville. Montréal est une ville de créateurs, d'inventeurs, d'entrepreneurs. Je connais personnellement des gens qui déménagent ici pour profiter de cette aura. J'espère juste qu'il y aura une masse critique de gens qui regardent en avant plutôt qu'en arrière pour que plus jamais je lise des commentaires comme ceux-là.

vous pouvez les voir dans la video, c'est très... émoouvant.

Orgasmique!

La visite en video. http://mtlurb.com/forums/showthread.php?p=49991#post49991

A 13 heures aujourd'hui, je mettrais le lien pour la vidéo de la visite, pour ceux qui veulent vivre ou revivre l'expérience.

Ce genre de revêtement me semble plus intéressant que celui utilisé pour le Westin dans le Vieux Montréal. Moins brutal.

J'aime les hotels. Je vais en acheter un.

He's probably confusing underground city with underground economy...

C'est un peu inusité de voir un projet au centre-ville de Montréal en chantier, mais de ne pas avoir encore de plan ou de rendus.

Je suis vraiment heureux de voir ce projet avancer. Il aura un gros impact au niveau de la rue et au niveau culturel. J'ai hâte de le voir vibrer et renipé.

Un bon article pour le branding de Montréal... February 7, 2009 EXECUTIVE PURSUITS By HARRY HURT III I STRODE toward a sixth-floor plate glass window overlooking downtown Montreal with my back to a digital camera, virtual visions dancing in my head. Dressed in a blue business suit, I had come to the offices of Eidos-Montreal in executive pursuit of learning how to make video games. Now I was being enlisted as a stand-in for an avatar, a lead character in an imaginary drama that was starting to bear an eerie resemblance to real life. The working title of the video game was World of Hurt: Boom or Bust. Both its concept and aim were risky. Classic best-selling video games are about driving virtual cars and shooting at virtual opponents, and they are aimed at teenage boys. World of Hurt aspired to be a game about balancing greed versus conscience amid a global financial crisis, and it would be aimed at so-called mature professionals. Nicholas Cantin, 34, an art director with a spherical forearm tattoo and hair pinned in a bun, asked me to stand as close to the window as possible so I would appear to be looming over the cityscape below. His colleague Joey Whelan, 32, a senior marketing artist in a T-shirt and jeans, told me to stretch my arms out to the sides. “I’m going to manipulate images of you to use for the cover of the box the video game will come in,” Joey said, clutching the digital camera. “The idea is that you’ve got the good side, the boom, on your left, and the evil side, the bust, on your right.” After taking a few shots from behind my back, Joey had me turn in profile so he could shoot photographs of a “good” tycoon and an “evil” tycoon that would later be superimposed as reflections on opposite sides of the plate glass window. That assignment seemed simple enough, but whenever I thought about being evil, I grinned from ear to ear, and whenever I thought about being good, I scowled. Joey promised to resolve the problem by switching the “evil” photo for the “good” photo and vice versa. “That is the dilemma of the game itself,” Nicholas noted. “It’s part of the challenge you face in balancing greed versus conscience.” I nodded, chagrined at how seriously the Eidos-Montreal creative team had taken a whimsical idea I’d proposed just a few hours earlier and at how quickly they had begun to turn it into a concept for a potentially marketable video game. Then again, video gaming is a serious and extremely fast-paced industry that is capturing an ever larger share of the entertainment market. In 2008, global sales of video games grew 20 percent, to $32 billion, surpassing sales of DVD and Blu-ray movies ($29 billion) for the first time, according to the research firm Media Control GfK International. A report by the NPD Group’s market data gatherers put video game sales in the United States last year at over $21 billion, more than double the $9.5 billion in domestic box-office revenue earned by Hollywood movies. Improbably enough, Montreal has become a capitale du jeux vidéo over the last decade with a local development and production community of nearly 6,000 people. Although the winters are brutal, the city has several top-rated universities, a mix of North American and European cultural influences and Canadian government tax credits for multimedia companies worth up to 37.5 percent a year. Ubisoft Montreal, founded in 1997 as a unit of the Paris-based firm, is already the largest video game studio in the world with 1,800 employees. Among its best-selling titles are Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series, the Prince of Persia series and Shaun White Snowboarding. The company also sponsors an educational program known as Ubisoft Campus that trains 80 college graduates a year in game design, animation and game-character modeling. Founded in February 2007, Eidos-Montreal is a unit of the London-based video game publisher SCi Entertainment Group. The firm has 212 employees, many of whom formerly worked for Ubisoft, and plans to expand to 350 employees over the next three years. Eidos-Montreal markets games mainly through Microsoft and Sony, which collect royalties by selling the software on their gaming consoles. Its best-selling titles include the Deus Ex series, the Tomb Raider series, the Hitman series and Pony. During my visit to Eidos-Montreal’s offices, I was reminded that making video games can be as costly and labor-intensive as making Hollywood movies. A commercial video game is basically a computer program that calls for over three million lines of code, a task well beyond the solitary “bedroom programmers” of the mid-1970s Pong era. According to Eidos-Montreal’s general manager, Stephane D’Astous, development of an AAA-quality game typically takes 2,000 man-months of work spread over two years at budgets ranging from $5 million to $50 million. If those kinds of figures necessarily limited what I could hope to achieve in a one-day introduction to video game making, they did not daunt the passion of the Eidos-Montreal staff for the task at hand. Stephane matched me with a multicultural seven-man creative team led by a producer, Mario Aguera, 39, a shaggy-haired London-born computer prodigy who has been making games since 1977, and Gilles Matouba, 32, a half-French, half-Congolese game designer with a stubble beard and a gold earring. “Two of the general concepts of a video game are escapism and player choice,” Mario said at the outset of a brainstorming session that ran from 9 a.m. to noon in a conference room. “Is it more fun to choose to play a corrupt financial tycoon or a detective who tries to catch you?” By 4:30 p.m., Nicholas and Joey had composed a mock-up of the box cover art and Gilles had produced a 17-slide PowerPoint presentation. The slides invited you to assume the roles of tycoons in a real time, multiplayer, morally challenging Monopoly game in which you tried to build the biggest possible empire while avoiding exposure as a fraud and financial collapse. You could choose a “greed route,” which relied on crimes and cheating but produced speedy financial growth. Or you could choose a “conscience route,” which relied on trust and transparency but produced much slower growth. Eventually, you would face a day of reckoning prompted by randomly timed “reality checks” like whistleblowers, government investigations and public outrage. You could defend your empire with lawyers and public relations consultants in a lavishly decorated headquarters, but you’d pay a high price for these “smokescreens.” You could also leave your fate to chance at a minigame of musical chairs in which you passed healthy assets and toxic assets to other players until the music stopped. “I love the irony,” Mario declared. “This is a virtual representation of a real-world financial system that is itself based on virtual money backed only by the faith and credit of the government. The goal of the game is to become so big and corrupt that the government has to bail you out. That’s so twisted, it’s brilliant.” As Gilles duly noted, World of Hurt was still many steps away from becoming a virtual reality. There needed to be game loops that determined the ultimate winners and losers. There were avatars to create, actions to animate with sound, music and special effects, code to write and marketing plans to hatch. Then there would be rigorous testing, retesting and tweaking before the finished game could be stamped onto a gold disk, the equivalent of a movie master print. Even so, Mario allowed that we had made enough progress to solicit preliminary feedback from a focus group. I could think of no better focus group than my readers. So in the interactive spirit of video gaming, I offered to pose Mario’s major questions to you: Does World of Hurt: Boom or Bust sound like fun? Would you still want to play this virtual game two years from now — or are you already sick of playing it in reality? E-mail: pursuits@nytimes.com Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map

Le Louis Bohème va s'élever aussi haut que le double du building blanc à côté, ou si vous voulez, de cette perspective, il devrait cacher le building de SNC en arrière , qu est-ce que vous en pensez?

Ça va-t-être une belle grosse cannette géante avec une goupille sur le toit pour voir les étoiles. Non, non, j'ai confiance au processus. Avez-vous confiance au processus?

J"ai toujours cru que le provincial n'avait pas le "droit" sur le fleuve Saint-Laurent. Donc, le provincial a le droit de construire un pont traversant le fleuve?

Est-ce que les ponts ne sont pas de responsabilité fédérale? Dans l'article, on semble parler du ministère provincial. Certains ponts sont fédéraux, d'autre provinciaux of course! Je me demande ça, parce que la politicaillerie fédérale semble toutjours retarder les projets au Québec.

Ça ressemble au rendement qu'on aurait eu si on n'avait placé l'argent dans des obligations du gouvernement. lol

De relativement petits investissements qui rapportent gros esthétiquement!

Ignatieff, le prochain premier ministre du Canada, va-t-il appuyer le projet? Il y a de bonnes chances, juste une impression.

Oui, mais pas à Laval.

On peut bien se plaindre des politiciens. Mais on a les politiciens qu'on mérite! Ce sont nos attentes, nos expectatives par rapport au futur qui déterminent les décisions politiques d'aujourd'hui. Tout comme ce sont nos attentes dans nos propres vies personnelles qui déterminent nos choix dans le présent. Si vous êtes cynique, vous invitez un avenir encore plus déprimant. Si vous êtes confiant, optimiste, et exigeant, qu'est-ce que vous préparez pour l'avenir?

Ahhh les réalistes!!! Il y a bien des choses qu'on ne croyait pas possible et qui se sont réalisées! On n'a qu'à penser aux pyramides, la pillule anticonceptionnelle, l'avion, Obama, Dubai, les baisses d'impôts, la poutine...

Il n'y a jamais eu autant d'étoiles enlignées pour que ce rêve se réalise!

Un signe encourageant dans le NY Times: January 26, 2009 With Senator Chosen, Paterson Tries to Move On By MICHAEL WILSON Gov. David A. Paterson appeared eager to put the widely maligned process of selecting New York’s new senator behind him during a brief press conference on Sunday in Manhattan, when he praised his selection, Kirsten E. Gillibrand. He also explained his decision to travel to a global economic meeting in Switzerland this week, saying he had decided in December to attend. The governor’s remarks followed a lunch with Ms. Gillibrand; her predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton; and Senator Charles E. Schumer at the Waldorf-Astoria. They discussed foreign and economic affairs, Governor Paterson said. The governor has been criticized for his office’s handling of the appointment, particularly after Caroline Kennedy, who had been considered a top contender, withdrew from consideration on Wednesday. On Friday, Mr. Paterson said of the process, “In retrospect, I wish I had not showed all of you the wrestling match.” But that tone was not in evidence on Sunday, when the governor took two questions before leaving the hotel for a ceremony. The first question regarded the criticism of the treatment of Ms. Kennedy’s candidacy. “Caroline Kennedy called me on Wednesday, whatever date Wednesday was, Jan. 21, to inform me that for personal reasons she had to withdraw,” he said. “She had gotten no signal from me that she had to withdraw.” He added: “She is a great New Yorker. She is a great friend of mine and there is nothing that would have prohibited her from serving.” Regarding Ms. Gillibrand, a congresswoman from upstate, he said she was off to a good start by traveling to places where she is little known, including Harlem and Queens. The second question involved Mr. Paterson’s trip to Davos, Switzerland, which his office announced on Saturday. Much of the five-day forum will focus on how countries and central banks can address the global downturn, and Mr. Paterson said the United States stood to gain by lending money to other countries. “There’s an immense opportunity if we use some of those resources to try and make loans available to other countries,” he said. “It would give us bigger resources for the taxpayers.” “There’s a desire to have leaders from around the country be in Davos to talk about the interests of a lot of countries right now whose exports are limited,” he said, before leaving the hotel. The press conference was held in a small hallway outside the restaurant Oscar’s, where the quartet sat down at 1:30 p.m. Ms. Gillibrand is set to be sworn in on Tuesday in Washington. Neither Senator Schumer nor Mrs. Clinton appeared at the news conference. Ms. Gillibrand continued taking questions after the governor left. Addressing critics who have said she is lax on gun control, she said she would be flexible and consider the concerns of what is now her statewide constituency. Ms. Gillibrand said that her upstate district had a strong tradition of hunting and that although she supported gun control, she did not want to take rights away from hunters. “I very much believe in protecting hunters’ rights,” she said. Mrs. Clinton had offered her advice on how to be an effective senator. The bulk of it, Ms. Gillibrand said, was about how to organize her office to best serve the many requests that come from constituents across the state. She said she would follow Mrs. Clinton’s example and “hit the ground running.” Ms. Gillibrand also spoke of developing a plan for high-speed rail service to Montreal and to Buffalo, and emphasized her availability to those who are not familiar with her. “You will see me wherever you want to see me,” she said. As if to underscore this message, when she left, she walked the long way through the Waldorf, stopping to talk to members of the public. Joel Stonington contributed reporting. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/nyregion/26paterson.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=montreal&st=cse