orages lointains

great, does that mean that the famous concordia giant dumpster will finally disappear? i'm believe that it has been there since before i was born.

Exactement! voici les limites exactes de la propriété que la Ville vient d'acquérir:

 

[ATTACH]26572[/ATTACH]

oh! i hadn't realized that they'd not purchased the parking lots as well. damn, that's a shame.

expanding a parc inside the 100+ year old walls?? plus the "parcs" where the parc avenue interchange was are absolutely never used. i like ferrandez on so many things, but he's a hardcore nimby and he wants to prevent traffic. we could house a thousand people on these giant parking lots and we should: reduces rent pressures on the plateau, keeps people close to the center, brings more people in to support local businesses at a time when they really need it. it would, frankly, be irresponsible not to build here. the only question is parking. i say zero. mr environment ferrandez, will he agree?

great. now build on the enormous parking lot.

it's great they'll have over 40 million to put toward this project, that's a number high enough that they can do a lot of improvements but not so high that they can go crazy on a two year project.

in my opinion, the place des arts is particularly special because each of the buildings comes from a different era and style.

grande salle wilfred peletier - 1950s/1960s international style

maisonneuve theatre - 1960s béton brut

the MAC - 1980s post-modernism

symphony hall - 2000s enviro/high tech vernacular

a substantial renovation of the MAC to remove the more flamboyantly post-modern elements (the large glass panels, for instance) would be a real shame. the areas that i think really warrant renovation are the saint catherine side and the sculpture garden. with the restaurant along jeanne mance now, it's not really necessary to open that side up like it would have been in 2000 or whatever. also, i'm not sure when people were last there, but the rooms themselves are pretty great - luminous, great volumetry, etc. the entrance is a bit cramped, however that is no reason to reorient it to saint catherine street. ideally, they'd renovate the sainte catherine-facing side into a restaurant/bar and maintain (but renovate) the plaza entrance.

yeah, they need seating and not grass. the rest is okay, but the grass idea is completely moronic. can they really be thinking that they'll demolish the plateau's most used public space?? seems crazy.

prediction: it will be demolished.

vraiment dommage qu'un tel immeuble enlève des ventes aux autres projets du quartier. better to see the second tower of roccabella or icone or YUL or the new proposal beside the macdonalds. instead, it's 500 sales at this mediocre building, with this dumb passarelle, in the middle of nowhere. sad!

i love it and i think it's a great addition to the landscape. qu'on ajoute un quarantain de tels immeubles (audace, ayant un grand nombre d'unités) à travers le centre-ville et non pas ces tours style vancouver/toronto.

the building under construction just to the left of the molson brewery tower. crane on top, you can see the sunset peeking through the top floors.

^ different subcontractors?

still no progress at all on the saint hubert or ontario street frontage, i wonder if it's abandoned or delayed or moved to a second phase, or if it's on schedule. the new rendering distinctly shows the ontario street side included in their project.

http://www.mtlurb.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=23203

le projet de prolongement inclut un garage souterrain assez coûteux, comme celui de la station côte vertu. garer les nouvelles voitures ajoute pas mal à la facture du prolongement, faut pas oublier...

most tourists speak english and most tourists aware of montreal have the impression that it's a french-speaking city. normally, such an incorrect impression would invite correction. but the politics of quebec make it difficult to advertise that montreal is, by and large, very friendly to english-speaking travelers.

^ this is a good post on both counts.

the significance of the culture number is that we spend a lot of money on culture in montreal and quebec, and it's interesting to see data that justify the wisdom of such outlays. culture spending helps bring tourists.

to reply to malek and others: the reason that international visitors are more interesting than quebec or canadian visitors is that the force multiplier is much greater for international arrivals. they spend significantly more. when we're deciding how to allocate tourist dollars, a quebec tourist is worth less than a canadian and a canadian is worth less than an american. everyone should be counted, but my figure (just over two million) counts international arrivals only because they're the impact tourists.

and my broader point was that for all the serious problems we have promoting montreal (language, politics, low profile, low word-of-mouth), we're still attracting a lot of them! it's impressive.

10 million! now is the time to remind that there are different metrics for tourist visits. the euromonitor post above is a more accurate one because it's based on accommodations. we may have 10 million "tourists" but if they're "touring" from laval and returning home, it does not count in the same way (airport, hotel, car service, etc). they spend money, but it's not because of an international profile or whatever.

^ pour le moment. mais le genre de réfection dont on parle améliore nettement le quartier. c'était qqc d'idiot démolir la bâtisse en face de la maison du développement durable sans construire le parc prévu certes. mais dans le contexte du QdS, contourner un stationnement vers un joli parc, c'est quelque chose d'intéressant, oui. hydro-québec n'a pas besoin de ce grand ilot de parking, il vaut mieux construire dessus ou bien le refaire en parc comme prévu...

1. broadly, vancouver and toronto do better with north american tourism for the simple reason that most tourists speak english.

2. they do better with asian tourism because they have big asian populations with all that entails (restaurants, tours, etc).

3. montreal is in the unenviable position of being much more english-friendly than tourists from america, canada, europe or or latin america know BUT existing in a political climate where it is difficult to promote the city as an english speaking tourist destination.

4. montreal's weather is horrifyingly bad in winter and many people find the summer heat to be extreme. we can't fix this. (though heated lamps around tourist areas would be nice.

5. very low recognition of montreal. i've spent extended period of time in japan, china and hong kong, france and germany, and the united states, and knowledge of montreal is either low or non-existent (as in asia).

6. we have less business tourism than most cities, so few people get that "first visit" that makes them love the place.

7. montreal has almost zero presence in american or global popular culture (film, television, music) and it's pretty weak even in canada. arcade fire and denis villeneuve are great, but toronto has people like ryan gosling and drake and justin bieber, and vancouver has people like ryan reynolds and seth rogen and several asian megastars. and our people talk about montreal the way people from pittsburgh talk about that city. drake never stops talking about how great toronto is, seth rogen is always talking about vancouver as his home city. entire chinese films are set in vancouver!

8. we've still not repaired the damage that drapeau did to the city. prague gets more tourists than toronto and vancouver combined. why? because it's beautiful and walkable. montreal used to be the most beautiful and walkable city in north america, until the previous generation took a hammer to the central city. we've been fixing it little by little, but we need to create a real plan, with multi-year funding provisions, to restore the city to something that looks more like prague than it does winnipeg. cover the freeways, hide the empty spaces, plant more trees. people visiting montreal always tell me how jarring is the contrast between beautiful and ugly montreal. one friend said it was a mix between brussels and cleveland. we need to solve this.

AND for all of these problems, our tourism number is still 2.3 million! it's amazing. the people in charge are doing something right.

Croyez-vous que le parc se fera en deux phases ? Pour le moment il s'arrête net à la fin de la Maison du développement durable, mais sur les images, on voit qu'il est sensé se joindre à un autre parc en axe est-ouest.

question qui demeure toujours ouverte trois ans plus tard.

tout comme mon commentaire de 2012 reste pertinent!

on a besoin d'un mur le long du périmètre sud pour que le stationnement d'à côté cesse de nuire à la sublimité de ce parc.

quand verra-t-on ce mur! build this wall, m. coderre!

as expected, trudeau is on board for the REM.

"We're very anxious to work with the Caisse [de dépôt et placement du Québec] to see how the federal government could be a partner in this project," Trudeau said.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/justin-trudeau-quebec-liberals-speech-1.3560731

quebec is in, the caisse is in, trudeau will for sure (transit spending is a top priority, and the west island is the core of the PLC's national base). this is looking very much like it will happen!

also, the best argument that the caisse is likely confident in the numbers is this one:

There's also the conflict of interest angle on this as well.

 

- Who is to say the Caisse won't push to have stations located closer to Ivanhoe Cambridge properties

- With the Caisse having a major stake in Bombardier Transport, they could influence the process to favor them

- Same thing goes for large engineering firms like the article said: SNC, Tecsult & Roche, etc. The Caisse is a large investor in them.

it seems obvious that the Bill 1 restrictions will be lifted or not applied because it's a p3. this is likely to be a largely made in quebec project with the caisse able to capture an important percentage of the value, while investing in quebec jobs, quebec expertise and quebec infrastructure. it's an amazingly good project, run by an organization that i trust to keep to budget and timetable 100x more than i do any level of government.

again, the only issue i have is with the tentative nature of the edouard montpetit and mcgill connections. when sabia and quebec are speaking with trudeau, they must stress the importance of these to both systems. having read the 2007 engineering report, i realize that it could up $600 million for just these two stations. m. trudeau, it's worth it!

finally,

^ and this is a trend that will only increase. indeed, it may be that montreal is seeing now only the beginning of a massive return to central city living. every city in north america is seeing a massive return to the "downtowns," cities like denver and seattle are almost unrecognizable, los angeles and miami are on decade-long building booms reshaping the core, vancouver and toronto look like smaller asian versions of chicago. it's not foreign money in all these places, it's younger people who don't want to waste time auto commuting, would rather walk/bike/take a quick train ride. we've been lagging but projects like tom, the drummond or the peterson - affordable condos 20 minutes away from work - these are the future for montreal. and with every one of those that's built, the value of the downtown office tower increases slightly at the expense of the suburban office park.

^ ?? just a 150 meters from this building we have the QdS! UQAM, louis boheme, maison de la jazz, maison du développement durable, maison onf, etc. on the other side we have the cathedrale tower, tom, altitude, etc. there's an enormous amount of diversity in this area! we must wait until this building is complete before judging it! it's a nice addition at any rate and it fits perfectly onto mayor street.

it's sad that only a tiny number of people on earth understand this one.

but that technical study finds that, despite the great depth, it would actually be easier to build at edouard montpetit than at mcgill because of the great complexity of the infrastructure downtown. long, expensive and complicated are the three worst words a person can hear when it comes to construction projects, especially with public money.

^ the immense cost of constructing a mcgill station for the REM may actually help make the business case for a yellow line extension: spread the cost to 2 projects, increase yellow line ridership (possibly very greatly), decrease pressure at berri-uqam, decrease strain on the green and orange lines.