amaist

It would have been a minute regardless of lights when the old expressway was up. But hey! They made it pedestrian and cyclist 'friendly'. You get to see the sky before a container truck squashes you.

Lots of visible progress. Started to put down rails. The ramp from Lachine Canal bridge to the embankment leading to the viaduct is taking shape. It's not on Devisubox but the expansion of the bridge over de la Commune is progressing, too. Note how the elevated section is still broken up behind Costco. That's the last section to make the line complete from Lachine Canal to Pont Samuel de Champlain.

Making a telecom link bypassing the tunnel is pretty trivial. Plenty of options with good latency and redundancy. I am sure there are other complications getting in the way of that, though.

I don't think the construction cost is the only monetary factor that should be considered. That is easy to calculate and estimate. Even if it does end up going over budget. Building an elevated railway in the middle of one of the busiest streets of the city that is starting to see more densification moving east from downtown might have very serious monetary effects for all of the province. If it makes most of the real estate next to it less attractive the economic impacts might completely overshadow the extra cost of burying it. I am not qualified to say which way to go. This second factor is very difficult to estimate. But it does need to be looked at very thoroughly. What we all need is better transparency from the planning process. We all need to see the results of the cost/benefit analysis. In this day an age there is no excuse to hide that information, it's too easy to make it available after scrubbing private proprietary information. If we don't get that we keep falling back onto political arguments and feelings. Feelings are great but can deceive us.

The way the new highway is built from Atwater to the bridge a 70 km/h speed limit doesn't make any sense. It's too wide and smooth. Which is not a bad thing by itself. In many places around the world they discovered that you need to configure the actual physical shape of the road to the desired speed limit. When I travelled in Germany I had no desire to exceed the limit in the city. Streets with 30 km/h limit did not feel very comfortable to drive faster than that. Same for other limits. Lanes were narrower. But in North America we can have a 30km/h limit on a road with lanes big enough for major highway and visibility of over 1 km ahead. Then we just try to gestapo the drivers into compliance. As for the noise? This is the A9 autobahn from Munich to the airport. Yes, that will block the view of scenic Verdun and the glass factory. If you want a nice view then take the Bonaventure. I hear it will become an "urban boulevard". Eventually. Maybe. No, that part is not yet unlimited. But a little North of that the speed limit goes away in the evenings when the traffic is lighter.

Looks like they stopped updating that camera on the 19th.

The ramp got demolished because it was in very poor condition. In the original project it was supposed to be reused and was initially inspected to be in decent enough structural condition. Later it was discovered that the structure was very deteriorated and there was no money in the budget to completely rebuild it. There was a lawsuit against the company that made the original inspection that turned out to be incorrect. I was very much looking forward to this ramp getting rebuilt. I miss the old Brennan street going under the highway. It was a nice way to bypass all the traffic pileups to escape the city. It used to be possible to turn left going west on Wellington and St Jacques. Now everyone leaving old Montreal is trapped on either St Antoine or William (which is a disaster area now). All that did was create needless traffic jams. Didn't decrease car use in any way.

From my observations the compliance level is pretty good. I cross the bridge frequently and I don't often see anything but buses in those lanes. Keep in mind that the merge lanes share the space with the bus lane for a good bit of distance when entering the bridge. There is a white sign that signifies the official start of the bus lane and up to that point any other vehicle can be in that lane. The best way to merge by the way. At that point the traffic stretches out and there are large gaps between cars to merge into. Some cars do enter into the actual bus lane for a hundred meters or so. A traffic camera system would be pretty simple to implement there. The difficult part is making the right legislation to make it happen. There is occasional presence of SQ in the bus lane outside of rush hours hunting for speeders. Especially, on the south bound side.

Rents are too high in the area to support another place like that. Too bad. Yes, it was a bit of a throwback place but that's what was cool about it. There are plenty of modern and trendy options in the area already.

But the people who actually park their cars at Chevrier and then try to exit on Leduc side will win buy not having to leave that horrible place at 5pm. I made that mistake once. It would have been faster for me to drive in the old Champlain Bridge traffic jam than wait forever in line to exit that place. The way the road network is being setup at Rive Sud station will be a huge improvement (I hope). These amazing new inventions like having multiple lanes exiting a parking lot. The planners setting up Chervier parking probably thought that cars will leave the lot over a constant trickle for 5 hours in the afternoon and not jam themselves mostly into the same hour. And then feeding them into one of the least efficient intersections on the South Shore (Leduc/Lapiniere).

And that's just the buses. Once the Turcot ramps 15N-136E and 136O-15S get connected the majority of large truck traffic will move away in addition to some car traffic. Even if it's a little longer in distance it would be much safer for a tractor-trailer to go with no traffic lights and almost no lane changes. New Turcot ramps a being built in a modern fashion where the exits are always to the right. Left exits belong in the 1950s and on the Garden State Parkway (also from the 50s). I am curious to see what they will do with the bus lane. On street parking? .... LOL, not with the current city administration. A bicycle lane that has no good access from the south side until they come up with a hacked up semi-solution on Wellington? Possibly. I would actually love to see a good bicycle lane both north and south bound but the whole project design seems to have forgotten a bout that. I ride my Bixi on the central area between Wellington and Notre Dame. Is that legal? Probably not. Will that keep me alive to be able to pay the potential ticket. Hell, yes!

This proposal looks pretty but would only make sense if the whole area starts a major redevelopment. It's too far from Nun's Island and Verdun and there is nothing in Technoparc. Further North it's cut off by the rail yards. If the rail facilities move and Technoparc gets built up in a major way it would then make sense to make a nice riverside boulevard with parks. Otherwise, not even the homeless would bother going that far to that place. Parc Jean-Drapeau serves very well as a park with riverside views because it's relatively easy to access but all kinds of transport and has it's own attractions on site. This is why the proposal is aimed at 10 years in the future. Lots of other pieces are needed to complete the overall puzzle. In other words, it's another Notre Dame Est proposal. Nice sketches that will stay that. Save those files to your computer because just like ND proposals from 15 years ago they might disappear into the memory hole of cyberspace.

My guess is that those are very preliminary "sketches" with which they will try to get an approximate cost. Even if it seems ridiculous it's worth examining and having some more precision supporting any future decision. It might support the idea that it's a useless idea or maybe it will support it the other way. I am not convinced it's a workable plan but it would help to get better data. There is nothing wrong with assumptions being challenged intelligently. That's how we learn and progress.

The new access ramp to 10 Est will open very soon, too. This will make the overpass even more useful. The first real test of it will be this weekend. REM is closing boul. Leduc under the 10 forcing all traffic to the new overpass. Dix30 shoppers will be more confused than usual on the road.

I don't know if it's the tight deadlines or lack of follow up. There are constantly factual mistakes in news reports. There was no way for this accident to happen by driving west on Notre Dame. It's one-way going east and right now at 11:00 am it is full of dump trucks arriving and leaving the Banque Nationale construction site. Just by looking at the map and knowing just a little bit about what is going on in the city they are reporting on would make that mistake very obvious.

It would be nice if they would actually finish that job. There was no activity at that site for months now and there is still a deviation of the exit to Taschereau Boulevard. That deviation creates a few unsafe situations because of people "lost" in the right lane trying to jump back onto 10 East. The original setup is more obvious and creates more space and time to figure out the correct lane.

Here is what the agreement between the Feds and SSL says about the bike paths on the South Shore: You can find the whole text here: https://buyandsell.gc.ca/procurement-data/tender-notice/PW-NB-001-68955 Specifically the file nbsl-champlain_bridge.zip and in there it's Schedule 7 Part 11 SSL is only responsible to connect the path to the existing path along the Seaway and also provide space for connections to Brossard. Those connections will have to be done by other entities. I hope Velo Quebec would pressure both the province, feds and Brossard to get that done.

So JDM makes it sound like the REM will face the same issues as the O-Train rolling stock. The only connection between the two is that both are built by Alstom. That's like saying that if you had issues with your Mercedes Sprinter van then expect the same from your Freightliner long-haul truck. After all they are both built by Daimler AG. The Citadis Spirit was specifically created for the O-Train and it's its first ever deployment. That's a beta version of that train and Ottawa commuters are testing it. Yes, maybe the testing should have been more thorough but some bugs will inevitably sneak through. The Metropolis trainsets for the REM have been deployed in many other places already. If they do get serious issues at the start then we definitely should get our pitchforks and torches. Also lawyers.

They actually do have a connection to the neighborhoods drawn on the presentation. Of course that's just a faint drawing. You have to really stare at the picture to see it. It's easy to draw stuff on the computer. We'll see if they will do anything about it. My guess is that it's not in the contract to make those connections. If someone cares the contract is available to download from the federal government's website. I don't have the time to look through it, though. I imagine they drew the extra paths so faintly in the hope that nobody would remember to ask about it.

Exactly! I don't know the specifics of the studies that predict a 10% drop in ridership when a transfer is added. There are so many complications involved. Sure, if you just add a forced transfer and don't add any other value a ridership drop is inevitable. But if you use that transfer to hook up to a whole new system of transport that makes all kinds on new destinations possible what would that do to the ridership numbers? The REM system is not some commuter train for shuttling office plankton between sleeping and working locations at rush hour. It's an almost always on mode of transport. In some aspects better than the existing Metro (air conditioning FTW!). One doesn't need to adapt their schedule to the REM unlike most EXO trains.

The Caisse responded to the first article that didn't have much substance other that trying to make a scandal out of something that was understood from the beginning. According to the Gazette it somehow would be bad for the Caisse and their investment partners to benefit from the REM project. This was the original mandate of the project and that's why the previous government appointed the Caisse to figure out how to make a transit project happen and at reasonable cost and benefit. The new article finally tries to back up the reasoning behind the "unnecessary" proposition. The alternatives given all have their own issues and none are obviously better than the chosen solution. Some seem unworkable once you examine the real situation on the ground. How is that a sign of corruption? Purchasing 4 times the necessary amount of cement for the Olympic stadium is a sign of corruption. Choosing a non-ideal alternative out of all the non-ideal alternative but having a better financial result is just choosing a better alternative. The Gazette's doubling down tone in the second article just digs them in further.

1. Adding a 3rd rail through TMR/VMR is tricky at best. Crossing under the Met, space available, residential expropriation, etc. etc. 2. On the drawing you see the additional tracks that will store the trains of the Mascouche line. There is absolutely no room past the Mont-Royal station to do that. Not unless you want to destroy the town. In general, I don't understand why there would be much concern about the Caisse benefiting from the real estate development. They were always up front about this type of potential benefit. That was actually one of the selling points of the whole system. In the end it benefits all residents of Quebec. It's not like the investment benefits will only go to pay for some guys yacht and cosmetic surgery. I suppose we could also dig for the monetary motivations for articles like this and the funding for some of those "experts". Maybe someone else is trying to pay for their yacht but REM will make their holdings not as attractive. Or they could just be trying to draw attention to themselves. Being quoted in a newspaper makes one a bigger "expert" in the field. And the newspaper makes money from advertising. If we read the article then they get more views and more ad revenue. An article that stirs the pot and gets an emotional response in either direction is a win for the paper. The facts and context are not even a secondary consideration here.

Unless they are trying to be mean I don't see it being the last one to open. The entrance to ramp L (15N -> 136E) is shared with K (15N -> 20O) that is opening on Monday. They already used it occasionally during some weekend closures. What prevents it from opening now is the unfinished state of 136. Once both directions are opened on the 136 that ramp should be easy to finish. It will help in a major way with traffic on Bonaventure as trucks can take a straight shot from Samuel de Champlain Bridge and turn toward the port at Turcot instead of playing bumper cars on Robert Bourasa before reaching the ramp to the 720E. This depends on SSL finishing the 15N segment from the bridge, of course. By Christmas it should sort itself out. Once we finish celebrating the opening of the shiny new Turcot interchange and Samuel de Champlain Bridge we will get a little breather for maybe a year in 2021 and then will get hammered with Tunnel Lafontaine and St Pierre interchange reconstructions. Then maybe after that the Metropolitan will finally get addressed and maybe, just maybe they will finally figure out what to do with Notre Dame Est. Don't delete Waze from your phone just yet.

Most of Montreal metro tunnels were constructed with a cut-and-cover method close to the surface. It's generally cheaper, especially, if you want to do a double track. Using a boring machine to make a double track tunnel would be pretty complex. Almost all examples that I can think of have a single track going through individual deep tunnel (Chunnel, etc.). A single track tunnel can be made in a circular shape using a conventional boring machine. Increasing the diameter to accomodate two tracks with a single massive boring machine would be much more than double the expense. Surface area of a circle is π r2. If you double the radius you increase the surface area by 4 times. That's a lot of boring. And there is no way to build a cut-and-cover tunnel to the airport from the West Island branch. The airport authority will have a long chuckle if if NouvLR suggests they tear up the runways and taxiways to make a wider tunnel. As it is, single track tunnel is not the capacity limiter. The airport branch is one of three branches joining in TMR and going through the Mount Royal tunnel. That tunnel is the limiter. The cost of boring a second tunnel will be peanuts compared to adding a third track to the Mount Royal tunnel.

The fact that we have two recently built tolled highways with incompatible tolling systems is beyond absurd. I can always confidently claim that MTQ is the most incompetent transport authority in North America and use this situation to support my case. BTW EZ Pass works from Illinois to Maine to North Carolina. Every single significant tolled road structure supports it there. And the transponder is free to maintain. I got one from NY State Turnpike Authority. They sent it to my home address in Quebec. Makes traveling on the East Coast a breeze and cheaper. Why can't our clowns join it? The way the contracts for those projects (A30, A25) got awarded makes me feel the people in charge were either incompetent or corrupt.