rive-sud Pont Samuel-De Champlain

[Davidbourque]

Donc Monsieur_MA

 

Ta solution c'est Jammons les ponts et n'augmentons pas l'offre de transport en commun ?

 

 

Ce n'est pas le meilleur moyen d'asphyxier la croissance d'une ville ?

[Cyrus]

-creation of mono-culture single-income areas and other segregated communities

 

What's wrong with that? If you get poor people living nearby, you end up with a broken window in your house and a missing TV.

 

-

-loss of social capital and intermixing

 

What does that even mean?

[Cataclaw]

Oui le TEC frôle la capacité à bien des endroits, et c'est exactement pourquoi il faut investir plus!

Je dis de nouveau: on devrait mettre des péages sur toutes les autoroutes/ponts et doubler le réseau du métro.

 

 

Malek: the economy thrives on transportation, that's true, but not just car transportation. All transportation works, and we see this in Europe where you've got denser cities with smaller areas but larger populations, more transit and less automobile dependency. If it works in Europe, Asia, Africa and just about everywhere except Canada, the U.S. and Australia... then it can work here too.

 

The law of induced demand actually works in reverse, Malek. Believe it or not but reducing road capacity reduces demand as people migrate to other forms of transportation or live closer to the core.

When The A-19 collapsed in Laval, people were afraid of huge congestion problems but they never materialized.

When they tore down the Embarcadero freeway in San Francisco, they were worried about huge congestion problems but traffic actually went down.

 

Now, i'm not saying we need to tear down all our highways, but we do need to avoid further highway construction as much as possible and focus our investments on rapid transit as well as high-density walkable cities.

 

We won't "lose" jobs by doing this either. It just isn't true that automobile infrastructure is the only way to growth.

[Cyrus]

When the 19 was closed traffic was terrible!

[Cataclaw]

When the 19 was closed traffic was terrible!

 

Actually, it wasn't.

We looked at the A-19 case study in class last week. It's quite amazing how traffic DIDN'T go through the roof as you might expect. That crazy law of Induced Demand sure is counterintuitive sometimes, but it's how these things work. It's been well documented for decades now.

[Cataclaw]

Actually, it wasn't.

We looked at the A-19 case study in class last week. It's quite amazing how traffic DIDN'T go through the roof as you might expect. That crazy law of Induced Demand sure is counterintuitive sometimes, but it's how these things work. It's been well documented for decades now.

 

As for social capital and intermixing, these things are extremely important valuable for a lot of reasons. I don't have time to get into it right now, but I can point you to several books, journals and studies that show that social segregation leads to considerable problems.

 

I'll give you a quick example though since it's one I experienced myself as a youth. A couple moves into a new suburban residential subdivision. All of residents in the subdivision have similar incomes and are in a similar age group. They all have kids at roughly the same time give or take half a few a years. The "kid boom" causes the city to build a new school to meet the sudden surge in demand. The kids grow up and move out, the parents grow old and cease having kids. A lack of school enrollment causes the school to be closed and eventually torn down. I've seen this happen, I know people it's happened to, and this is just 1 out of a thousand similar problems that segregated homogeneous residential developments experience. It's pretty precise science, believe it or not. This stuff has been studied to death and is well documented. It's also the accepted norm academically. All the universities basically teach that sprawl is bad because it's become accepted science and proven fact. The vast majority of urban planners are working to fight sprawl and nobody really advocates for more highway construction like the old days, outside perhaps Houston.

 

As for social capital... look it up. There are many books, university courses, journals and studies that explain the concept and why it's become very important to urban planning. They'll explain it better than I can.

Modifié 24 octobre 2011 par Cataclaw

[Habsfan]

Once again, I agree with the gist of what you're saying, however, we aren't talking about a new highway here, we are talking about replacing the Champlain bridge... which was built in the late 50's and early 60's. It wasn't meant to deal with the amount of traffic it has to deal with today. You can't rebuild a 5 billion$ bridge and not increase its capacity to todays traffic flow.

 

I repeat, we aren't adding a new bridge to the south shore(like they did in Laval) we are replacing an old bridge that is falling apart!

 

Like I said before, add extra lanes and give this new bridge a high capacity light rail system, that way you can increase the number of people who want to use public transportation and you can help reduce the number of hours a day the bridge is jammed!

 

There are 12 lanes that connect the South Shore to The Island of Montreal. How many are there connecting Laval to MTL?

 

A quick count and I get 22 lanes connecting Laval to Mtl. Now I understand that building a bridge between Laval and Montreal is much cheaper seeing as the river isn't as wide as the St-Lawrence. I'm not demanding that we should have 22 lanes connecting the S.S. to Montreal, but the current situation dates back to the 60's. To say that we should keep the number of lanes that we have today is unacceptable. There haven't been any NEW links built between the South Shore and Mtl in over 44 years (1967). Meanwhile, the population on the south shore has tripled... if not quadrupled in that time.

 

Again, I understand that if you add more lanes, normally within 5 years the extra lane will be congested ( I took Urban Transportation classes with Prof. Zacharias at Concordia too!! ), however to leave the situation in its current state will only make it worse. To all of you who think that by reducing the amount of lanes into Montreal you will encourage people from the suburbs to move to Montreal, I say you should wake up and get your heads out of the sand. It isn't going to happen. All you'll end up doing is encouraging people to find jobs in the suburbs (which is a phenomenon that we are seeing more and more of). Lets not forget that history has shown us that as soon as young couples have kids, they leave the city EN MASSE. if more and more suburbanites decide to work in the burbs as well, then that is less money coming into Montreal.

Modifié 25 octobre 2011 par Habsfan

[Cyrus]

As for social capital and intermixing, these things are extremely important valuable for a lot of reasons. I don't have time to get into it right now, but I can point you to several books, journals and studies that show that social segregation leads to considerable problems.

 

I'll give you a quick example though since it's one I experienced myself as a youth. A couple moves into a new suburban residential subdivision. All of residents in the subdivision have similar incomes and are in a similar age group. They all have kids at roughly the same time give or take half a few a years. The "kid boom" causes the city to build a new school to meet the sudden surge in demand. The kids grow up and move out, the parents grow old and cease having kids. A lack of school enrollment causes the school to be closed and eventually torn down.

 

Sure, but then you can have friends when you are one of those kids...

 

-----

 

There are many cities boosting road capacity... in Toronto they just rebuilt QEW-403, they are working now on the 401, etc. And they have done many enlargements on their road network since construction. In Montreal almost all of our highways are in their "as-built" 1960's configuration!

Modifié 25 octobre 2011 par Cyrus

[Cataclaw]

Sure, but then you can have friends when you are one of those kids...

 

-----

 

There are many cities boosting road capacity... in Toronto they just rebuilt QEW-403, they are working now on the 401, etc. And they have done many enlargements on their road network since construction. In Montreal almost all of our highways are in their "as-built" 1960's configuration!

 

You can have even more friends in a medium-density heterogeneous neighborhood.

 

As for highway construction, that's what happens when municipal authorities ignore their planners and/or provincial transportation departments barrel ahead on the advice of transportation engineers alone (instead of a mix of transportation engineers and urban and regional planners)

 

The old method of "predict and provide" is outdated and now widely considered to be ineffective. The problem is transportation modeling used to ignore the effects of system performance on demand and land use. Now transportation modelers and planners have realized that these effects significantly alter the initial variables in a sort of feedback loop. The traditional 4-stage model works but it has to account for these discrepancies. Basically entities that are still building highways en-masse have ignored their experts and are continuing on with Business As Usual. They're shooting themselves in the foot in the long run when infrastructure costs go up, sprawl continues and it drives up maintenance costs and continues to reduce taxable revenue.

 

These cities that are still building highways think they're spurring their economies and saving money in the long term but they're actually significantly curtailing future growth and compromising future budgets by going down a path that will require huge sums for infrastructure maintenance alone (not just the highways, but the infrastructure costs of building and maintaining the low-density sewers that service 10 people on a street...)

 

Practices such as fiscal zoning (where a municipal or other governing entity zones according to favorable revenues-vs-costs ratios) will segment the urban fabric, further extending the cycle...

 

Suburbanization is a nasty, nasty beast that is incredibly inefficient in terms of costs and expenditures alone... not to mention the social, environmental and economic disadvantages. There's a reason with 99.9% of the experts are strongly against this unsustainable form of development: BECAUSE IT SUCKS!

Modifié 25 octobre 2011 par Cataclaw

[Monsieur_MA]

Ta solution c'est Jammons les ponts et n'augmentons pas l'offre de transport en commun ?

Ce n'est pas une solution, bien entendu. C'est simplement un fait, ou plutôt un problème. Malheureusement, ce n'est pas parti pour être réglé.

 

Rêvons un peu:

http://emdx.org/rail/metro/futur.php