Opposition keeps mounting to Notre Dame plan

If the Ministère du transport du Québec expected a smooth ride for its plan to upgrade Notre Dame Street between the east end of downtown and Highway 25, it was sorely mistaken. As we reported last month, a coalition of citizens has emerged with an alternative vision, one that would see Notre Dame converted into a truly urban boulevard that is well-integrated into the urban fabric of Montreal’s east end neighbourhoods. Today, two newspaper articles shed more light on the opposition to the province’s Notre Dame plan.

In today’s edition of the Mirror, news editor Patrick Lejtenyi meets with two neighbourhood activists:

“There are two big problems with the project,” says the Coalition’s Monique Désy Proulx, a 15-year Hochelaga resident who has long been a thorn in officialdom’s side over development and river access issues. “The first is, this is an enormous amount of money for cars in an era where we’re talking about Kyoto and air pollution. We should be opting for a new vision.”

(Just last week, on the eve of the global warming conference in Bali, Indonesia, Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced $350-million worth of new measures the province will apply to fall in line with its Kyoto commitments, to kudos both locally and abroad. The money will come from federal transfer payments, he said.)

“Second,” continues Désy Proulx, “we’re on the edge of the river, but we can’t exploit it at all.” Although part of the project would unite two parks on either side of Notre-Dame, the shoreline is otherwise blocked off from pedestrian access and remains an unimpressive industrial wasteland. “This could be an exceptional site,” she says.

And she isn’t impressed by any proposed park. The current waterfront park, Parc Champêtre, “isn’t somewhere I’d want to go at night,” she says.

“It’s cutting us off from the river for the next 50 years, which is absolutely revolting,” says Francis Lapierre, another coalition member. “It will be a huge concrete scar affecting the residents of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and Mercier.”

Meanwhile, in La Presse, a Columbia urban design graduate and interning architect named Étienne Coutu writes about the drawbacks of the Notre Dame plan, which would widen the street from four lanes to eight, involved a 200-percent increase in traffic capacity along some sections of the road. The current plan, he writes, is nothing more than a rehash of one that was rejected by the City of Montreal four years ago. Faced with an MTQ unwilling to back down, though, the city caved in.

Surprise! Les plans du ministère des Transports sont déjà prêts à être mis en oeuvre. Évidemment, puisqu’il s’agit du même projet que l’on ressort aujourd’hui des tiroirs, cinq années plus tard. Dans tous ses détails, il s’agit précisément du même projet que la Ville de Montréal avait fait avorter en 2003, en prétextant vouloir un boulevard urbain. Depuis, on s’est empêtré dans une foule de désignations possibles en prenant bien soin d’éviter le mot «autoroute». Néanmoins, le projet est demeuré le même, avec ses tronçons en tranchées, en tunnel, et en dépression sous une dalle aménagée.

La Ville a finalement plié l’échine devant le projet autoroutier du MTQ. Elle a abandonné ses traditionnelles demandes, dont la reconstruction des têtes d’îlots détruites il y a 30 ans, et a travesti ses pieuses promesses de créer un boulevard urbain digne de la Ringstrasse de Vienne. Si on en est arrivé là, c’est qu’il était hors de question pour le MTQ de faire des compromis: la Ville, sans le sou, s’est donc résignée et a baissé les bras. Aurait-elle monnayé cette abdication, comme pour son opposition au pont de l’autoroute 25?

It’s true that the alternative vision of Notre Dame that has been presented by the highway plan’s opponents is ambitious to the point of being far-fetched. It doesn’t take into account the fact that Notre Dame is the service road for one of the continent’s busiest ports. Unless the port is moved, it will remain an inhospitable street and certainly not one that would be conducive to any sort of human-scaled, pedestrian-oriented development.

But maybe that’s the point: we should be planning for the future. Building what amounts to an eight-lane expressway along a large section of our waterfront seems like a hopelessly passéiste approach to urban transport. Shouldn’t we be investing in sustainable alternatives instead of patchwork solutions that will not even last a generation? If Notre Dame is reconfigured according to the MTQ’s plans, it will only entrench the habits we will eventually need to abandon.