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Urbanites want an urban, Sainte-Catherine style, shopping experience, complete with walk along to consecutive and contiguous storefronts lining the street. Suburbanites want the freedom and accessibility of just driving to the mall with their car, parking and going in and finding everything in one place. Why don't we see shopping centres that truly combine both? Obviously, there are malls that kind of do, but i've yet to encounter a mall that fully implements both sides of the coin. So introducing.. my vision for a mall: -Not a single exterior surface parking spot. -The mall is meant to be located in a dense part of a grid patterned city. -There are wide sidewalks going all around, with stores lining the streets. -For those who want to park, there are roads leading through the mall, directly into a massive indoor parking garage, which is surrounded by the mall itself. Ta-da! Everybody's happy!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/nyregion/06broadway.html?_r=2&ref=michael_m_grynbaum&pagewanted=all Ceux qui n'aiment pas les "piétonisations" à Mtl devront s'y faire. C'est un mouvement de fond, et généralisé.....

APRIL 6, 2009, 9:17 PM By JIM MOTAVALLI G.M.’s P.U.M.A. prototype in Manhattan. General Motors may be so short of cash that bankruptcy is among its dwindling options, but the company is still in the business of creating dreams. Its latest dream, the P.U.M.A. mobility pod, to be unveiled Tuesday in New York, is pretty far out — and as such, requires no big immediate investments. Indeed, Larry Burns, G.M.’s vice president for research and development and strategic planning, said the P.U.M.A. prototype cost “only one half of one percent of G.M’s typical engineering budget” for a year. Of course, the P.U.M.A. (for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility) is not really a car, and it’s not really being introduced, except as a bit of blue-sky thinking about better ways to move around crowded urban areas than driving an automobile. Mr. Burns has used the phrase “reinvention of the automobile” before, in relation to fuel-cell vehicles like the G.M. Sequel. But the P.U.M.A., a joint project with Segway, the New Hampshire-based creator of self-balancing two-wheel scooters, is quite different. Think of a larger, two-passenger, sit-down version of the Segway PT, with two gyroscopically balanced wheels. The prototype has minimal bodywork, but podlike enclosures (which look like computer mice on wheels) are imagined for production. If it gets that far. If all of this conjures visions of a rickshaw, well, the prototype does somewhat resemble one. Mr. Burns imagines Singapore, which has rickshaws, as one possible early market. The P.U.M.A., which will be displayed at the New York International Auto Show (which opens to the public on Friday), is an electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries. James D. Norrod, the president and chief executive of Segway, says it has a 35-mile range and 35 m.p.h. top speed. A three-hour charge costs, not surprisingly, 35 cents. It is, in essence, a neighborhood electric vehicle, or N.E.V., whose limited speed keeps it off highways (and, in most states, off roads with speed limits over 35). Mr. Burns said that six P.U.M.A.’s would fit in a standard parking space. A new N.E.V. — many are little more than glorified golf carts— is not going to reinvent the automobile. Despite the claims by proponents of such vehicles that they serve the driving needs of many millions, they have failed to make much of a dent in the car market. Ford abandoned its Neighbor N.E.V. when it sold the Norwegian company that made it, Think Nordic, at the end of 2002. Fewer than 6,000 Neighbors were sold in the United States that year. Chrysler still sells Global Electric Motorcars vehicles, which have had some success in gated communities. In a meeting Monday with editors and reporters at The New York Times, Mr. Burns pulled out his cellphone to make a point: Project P.U.M.A. vehicles would be designed to tap into the two-way communications made possible by G.M.’s OnStar technology, which has six million North American subscribers. The vision is expansive: using “vehicle to vehicle,” or V2V, communications, these “100 percent digital” devices would communicate with one another over a quarter-mile range to prevent collisions, eventually allowing what G.M. calls “autonomous driving and parking.” Mr. Burns imagines a hands-free urban driver ignoring dense city traffic to concentrate on sending text messages from a PDA clipped in to serve as a dashboard, while the mobile Internet pod moves toward its destination. “My daughter sleeps with her iPhone in her hand,” Mr. Burns said. “At this point, is using a cellphone the distraction, or has driving become the distraction?” There’s more: the pods would also be equipped to communicate with the smart grid of the future (as is the Aptera EV, another podlike electric vehicle that is due to be introduced in the fall), returning electricity to utilities during times of peak demand. That’s not V2V, it’s V2G — vehicle to grid. NYT_VideoPlayerStart({playerType:"article",videoId:"1194839263765",adxPagename:"wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/video"}); The Segway PT costs $5,000, so the more capable 600-pound P.U.M.A. would presumably be priced considerably higher, though Mr. Burns declined to speculate where the sweet spot might be. “This is a prototype, not a product,” said Mr. Norrod of Segway. “We have not made a decision to commercialize it.” Mr. Burns concluded his remarks by offering a glimmer of what his company could become if it managed to transform the urban roadscape. “We were the S.U.V. company, and we accept that,” he said. “We want to become the U.S.V. company — known for ultra-small vehicles.” Copyright 2009 The New York Times CompanyPrivacy PolicyNYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/gm-conjures-up-a-people-moving-pod/?pagemode=print

Plan Nord' exploited Mining, energy Charest would expand Hydro-Québec output WILLIAM MARSDEN, The Gazette Published: 14 hours ago Premier Jean Charest ventured into solid Parti Québécois territory yesterday where he announced his government's intention to supercharge Hydro-Québec with $19 billion in new energy projects as part of his plan to open Quebec's north to massive development and resource exploitation and make the province an economic powerhouse. "We are the party that forges Quebec's future," he told an audience of Liberal faithful huddled under a large white tent erected in the rain-soaked Port of Sept Îles. As part of a continued string of staged events where local Liberals pack the crowd, the premier used the opening of new port facilities in Sept Îles, which were actually completed two years ago, to hammer home his vision of turning Quebec's north into an economic powerhouse of mining and energy exploitation. He calls it the "Plan Nord." His said new energy expansion plans that will add 3,500 megawatts to Hydro-Québec's grid by 2035. That's enough power to run about 600,000 homes - or Quebec City. Charest traveled in a chartered plane from Montreal to Sept Îles Thursday with his wife, Michelle, and then flew yesterday to the town of Gaspé to tour a Danish factory called LM Glasfiber that makes windmill blades. From Montreal to the Gaspé, every time he tours a plant, the Liberals make sure workers are lined up to shake his hand for the cameras. The Liberals campaign slogan, "The economy first, yes?" festoons his podiums and he never fails to mention the need for a majority government to navigate the province through the international slowdown. Yet in most of the areas he visits, the economy is doing well. With the exception of forestry, most other resource industries continue to thrive. So Charest warns of an "approaching storm." But it's a hard sell. Unless you are at sea, it's hard to see the hurricane before it hits and Charest finds himself frequently questioned about the embattled health-care system. This problem he blames on Pauline Marois and the PQ when they retired thousands of nurses and doctors in the late 1990s, creating a huge deficit of medical staff. He argues that without wealth generation Quebec cannot maintain its social services. Yet the expansion plans he announced yesterday won't see the light of day until at least 2015. So he tries to appeal to Quebecer's pride. "Quebec's north is mineral resources, it's energy for the future, clean and renewable energy. It's energy that we have developed and it's energy that is in our genes," he told the audience to great applause. "We have to plan for the future, for the future of our children," he said. Hydro-Québec is about to embark on several giant projects that will add another 4,500 megawatts to the grid, increasing its overall capacity of 38,000 megawatts by about 12 per cent. They will exact a high environmental price, environmentalists say. Charest hopes the grandeur of his economic vision will entrance Quebecers to support his Plan Nord strategy. He links it with signing labour mobility agreements with France and Ontario, which he claims will help open new markets for Quebec's resources. But even here it often sounds as though he wants to give jobs to foreigners. Yet it's hard to gage audience reaction, since they are all Liberals.

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