Source: MTQ
I was reading recently about Cleveland’s efforts in the 1970s to stop a county-planned highway from tearing a giant swath through one of that city’s poorer residential neighborhoods. This struck me as somewhat serendipitous, especially given the growing interest on the future of urban freeways in Montreal, which prompted a conference on the subject last Friday.
In his book Making Equity Planning Work, Norman Krumholz, Cleveland’s Director of Planning under Mayor Carl Stokes, describes how he engaged an engineering firm to produce an alternate route for the I-290. The result was politically decisive:
The alternative route proposal also served strong public notice that there was a serious disagreement among technicians, the kind of substantive disagreement that encourages politicians to negotiate policy. Up to this time, the highway engineers had utterly dominated the controversy. They believed and wanted others to believe that their traffic trip and cost data were authoritative and impartial; that their route selection was unbiased and optimal; that any change would add confusion, delay, and cost.
For those familiar with the MTQ’s dossiers on the Turcot and Nôtre-Dame East, the rationales provided by Cuyahoga county traffic engineers forty years ago will sound eerily familiar.
The MTQ’s engineers have effectively guarded their monopoly on future possibilities for Montreal’s highway infrastructure and consequently Montrealers have their hands tied; either they are for the project or, apparently, against progress itself. There are simply no other proposals on the table. While one might expect the city to challenge the province on this front, it has kept relatively silent on the file, expect for an announcement last November from Mayor Tremblay’s office that the Turcot should be fundamentally reconsidered. Unfortunately, that statement was not backed up by action.
Perhaps due to Tremblay’s effective non-position on this front, the Ministry of Transportation has succeeded in situating these major city-building projects–with a combined projected cost around $3 billion and long-term consequences on Montreal’s transportation future–in the purely technical realm of highway structures and traffic volumes. Is it just me, or is it more than a little bizarre that such major decisions are not subjected to more political scrutiny from other levels of government and broader public debate?
At a conference that took place this past weekend organized by the Montreal office of the ‘Direction de la Santé Publique’, attendees were treated to presentations by Ian Lockwood and Paul Moore, two traffic engineers who work for an Atlanta-based urban design firm helping cities remove urban freeways and re-urbanize fallow land. They stressed the importance of public process in determining a city’s long-term transportation future (something woefully absent in the MTQ’s many “public consultations” which amounted to explaining how this new efficient highway is going to make everyone’s life better). The speakers floated a few ideas for how to better use the Turcot Yards and distribute the inbound traffic into the grid: why not build a few arterial and local roads, connect the Yards to NDG with attractive pedestrian trails on the Falaise St. Jacques, and provide West Islanders with more reliable light rail service? This would make the Turcot Yards a desirable area for homes and businesses with excellent transit service.
This may or may not be the best proposal for the site, bu the point is: the decision is being made in Quebec City, not in Montreal and certainly not by those most affected by it. Is it not time we had a real alternative to consider?
A final word for those who fear the traffic mayhem that would ensue if highways were removed. Based on extensive experience helping ween U.S. cities from the highway habits, Ian Lockwood made a observation using the analogy of physics. “We assume that car use is an incompressible liquid that must be routed somewhere,” he said. “But it’s more more like a gas that fills whatever space it is given.” Sounds about right me.
18 comments
Great post! It is true that traffic magically disappears, unbuild it and they will go away. There is no example of a city removing a freeway and then crying Oh My God What Have We Done!
One of the best examples is Washington Square Park in New York City.
Here is a quote from Vin Cipolla,
http://mas.org/author/vin-cipolla/
“When Washington Square Park was closed to traffic in 1959, prominent residents of Greenwich Village, including Jane Jacobs and Eleanor Roosevelt, celebrated with a ribbon-cutting and by burning a car in effigy. Their ceremony marked the conclusion of a decade-long fight with Robert Moses, who had insisted that the park must be traversed by cars in order to ease the city’s traffic congestion. New Yorkers today are reaping the rewards of Jacobs’ victory. Moses’ predictions of traffic coming to a halt proved false, and Washington Square Park is one of the city’s best-known and best-loved public places.”
And the congestion never happened. The cars simply went somewhere else in search of freeways.
And here is Jane Jacobs on Modern city planners (which is quite sadly all too relevant today).
From her book, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities. As usual it is important to remember that she wrote this in 1961.
“…it is understandable that men who were young in the 1920’s were captivated by the vision of the freeway Radiant City, with the specious promise that it would be appropriate to an automobile age. At least it was then a new idea; to the men of the generation of New York’s Robert Moses, for example, it was radical and exciting in the days when their minds were growing and ideas forming. Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth. But it is harder to understand why this form of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to succeeding generations of planners and designers. It is disturbing to think that men who are young today, men who are being trained now for their careers, should accept on the grounds that they must be “modern” in their thinking, conceptions about cities and traffic which are not only unworkable, but to which nothing new of any significance has been added since their fathers were children.”
Arrested development indeed.
Fantastic post! Fantastic comment as well …
You may have heard: This past week, the Quebec’s Auditor General Renaud Lachance criticized the MTQ’s failure to have established any sort of coherent and comprehensive public and inter-governmental consultation process regarding Montreal’s transportation infrastructure… Something that the Ministry of Municipal Affairs had apparently requested of the MTQ over five years ago.
M. Lachance also criticized the MTQ for not having sufficient information regarding the (health, environmental and socio-economic) impacts of their mega-projects upon Montreal and the people who live here. Their database has reportedly not been updated since 2000.
The time has finally come for a real shift in how we see transportation infrastructure… You guys are doing a great job in educating the general public about why this matters so much.
Il ne faut pas oublier que le parti libârâl (présentement au pouvoir) est le parti du «çamant»*. Tou sais, là çamant, c’est pas mal bôn.
Le ciment a toujours permis au parti libârâl de financer sa caisse électorale occulte, parce que les contrats sont donnés aux tinamis aux deux pieds dans le «çamant» qui lui rendent bien.
Alors c’est pour ça que le ministère des transports, en bon laquais du parti libârâl, va pousser pour plus de «çamant», parce qu’il sait ce qui est bon pour lui.
* «Concrete» in french pronounced with a heavy italian accent, for the Québec political-reality challenged people who don’t realize the mob connections with the liberals.
Don’t forget the manif on 19 April http://benevolat.greenpeace.ca/node/356
The 20 is not the Lower Manhattan Expressway, Turcot Yards is not Greenwich Village, and the MTQ is not Robert Moses. (The actual Robert Moses wasn’t even the demonic Robert Moses of popular lore and received opinion, but that’s another tale.) There is a need for people and goods to move around this corridor, and wishing the traffic away won’t get rid of it.
What we *can* do is take on the MTQ at their own game. Where are the users of the 20 coming from and going to? What transit options do they have now, and why aren’t they using them? What about truck traffic and industrial transportation demand? With this information — some of which we have or should have, some of which we don’t — we could start to formulate a plan that meets the demonstrable transportation needs of the southwestern chunk of the island, without building a bigger highway. At the very least, we could use it to demand some specific answers from a wasteful and distant ministry with an iron will and a worrisome edifice complex.
The MTQ has released piles of figures, and Lockwood and Moore have offered some excellent ideas. If we bring them together, we can move beyond a vague design vision to a workable and concrete proposal. Montreal is full of civil engineers, urban planners, architects and transportation scientists, across four universities and dozens of private firms. There’s more than enough skills and information out there for committed people to develop a constructive alternative.
DC the MTQ doesn’t want to build a bigger highway, where are you getting that?
Notice the forest on the escarpment on the left side of the forest. 2 linear miles of hillseide, and used for nothing.
This could be a great off-road (mountain) bike trail that isn’ on busy & crowded (& illegal to ride off-road) Mont Royal…
DC, your point is well taken: the Turcot Yards is NOT Greenwich Village. But it could be, or at least something worth caring about, provided it becomes something other than a buffer for an autoroute.
The MTQ doesn’t plan to build a bigger highway, but all its talk about “modernizing” and bringing it up to “modern standards” means one thing: the capacity to move more vehicles, which has been proven in all past cases to increase usage.
I agree totally with DC. The project’s flawed, but there’s some pretty tenuous comparisons being employed.
The Cleveland example is hardly relevant. If you look at the area on Google Maps, or elsewhere, you’ll see that there’s not one, not two, not three, but FOUR limited-access bypasses for the city–a city with a population one-fourth that of Montreal. Look at a map of Montreal. There is not a single bypass of the island.
The “no highways in European city centers” comment comes up more often than not in these discussions–but it’s awfully simplistic. I can’t think of a Western European city the size of Montreal that doesn’t have a well-developed beltway system. Milan has the Tangeziale, Madrid has several circumferential bypasses; even Paris has the Périphérique.
These routes are vital for the economic health of these cities. Even in cities that we associate with the creative class–Berlin, Barcelona–the industrial base still makes up a huge percent of local GDP. Until heavy goods can use light-rail, and until freight trains can be flexible enough for just-in-time business, a developed expressway system is vital.
We don’t have a beltway in Montreal–the 30 will provide a bypass, but only to the south–mainly because of geography. Being on an island in the middle of a remarkably wide river, the city doesn’t have a tremendous amount of choice as to where its truck traffic goes, provided it wants to maintain the island’s (struggling) industrial base.
Commercial traffic needs to be accommodated somehow–encouraging public transit, densifying the city, great, but it’s only part of the story. Getting people out of their cars is wonderful–tear town the Bonaventure, mitigate the 720, I’m for it–but you can’t simply remove the hub around which Quebec’s industry is centered.
Montreal is a city that rose to prominence as a transport hub, and its industrial base reflects that. The inter-urban highways, the railroads, the port–they’re what justify the city’s existence.
The creative class isn’t going to suddenly replace dirty industry, the information economy isn’t going to replace the factories overnight. Montreal’s a city of industry–we can mitigate its effects, but we can’t renounce it outright.
**
That said–I am dumbfounded that the MTQ is maintaining the alignment through Cazelais street, especially given the negative press.
Never underestimate the Greenwich Village example. It’s a classic case of “acting locally”. And if that can work in Lower Manhattan it can work easily almost anywhere.
Here is a page about removing freeways.
http://www.preservenet.com/freeways/
Everyone’s right that I should qualify “bigger”. I guess I mean a bigger interchange; despite what the cutesy renderings say, a new interchange that requires more demolitions has an inherently bigger footprint. And a highway with larger capacity is going to have a bigger
Other than the demolitions, I think that what gets to me (and I’d venture to most of us) about this plan is that it takes a huge plot of land (the Turcot Yards and the falaise St-Jacques) and shrugs. It addresses a big urban challenge — what to do with a terribly cotaminated site squeezed inaccessibly between a fragile natural asset and a major development corridor — and flubs it on every way. We simply have to demand more, as advocates, as lovers of Montreal, as citizens.
Whatever we do, we can’t, as Michael points out, kill the island’s industrial competitiveness. Maybe that needs more Quebec or federal-level action on truck regulations, and a different kind of vision and funding for industrial transport. We can’t afford to lose our manufacturing advantages, such as they are.
Jean Naimard, il est possible de dénoncer les liens présumés entre le gouvernement libéral, des spéculateurs véreux et la pègre sans recourir à des farces racistes. Je suis plutôt d’accord avec vous sur le fond, mais le racisme n’est jamais acceptable.
Maria, il ne vaut même pas la peine de reconnaitre ses remarques – fais une recherche google et tu découvriras tout une corne de misogynie, de racisme, de homophobie et d’autres sentiments anti-canadiens et anti-québécois (y compris sur ce site). Je ne comprends pas pourquoi les éditeurs ne suppriment pas ces remarques toute suite – peut-être c’est parce que, comme on dit en anglais “if you give someone enough rope, they’ll hang themselves”.
Maria: Il n’y a rien de raciste à faire l’amalgame entre un parti politique corrompu et le crime organisé. Le crime organisé favorisera des gouvernements de droite parce qu’ils sont plus enclins à donner la liberté de faire ce qu’ils veulent aux plus puissants. Et ce n’est pas de ma faute si certaines ethnies ont emmené leurs organisations criminelles avec eux. En dénonçant celà de manière caustique comme je le fais, je passerai moins inaperçu que quelqu’un qui le fait de façon vaselinée.
William: Les éditeurs savent très bien que la censure apportera beaucoup plus de problèmes que ça en résoud. Si ce que j’écris vous choque, et bien ne me lisez pas, point final. Les gens sont assez adultes pour se faire une opinion eux-mêmes sans avoir besoin d’un ange gardien.
Sid: La falaise St-Jacques a été aménagée il y a une dizaine d’années; une piste cyclable a même déjà été construite, mais elle n’a jamais été utilisée, et les arbres l’ont envahie depuis.
C’est possible de la parcourir (à pied, les vélos ne passent plus depuis longtemps) en partant sous le viaduc de l’autoroute-15 sud, en passant derrière l’accès fermé par une barrière.
Selon les derniers dires, la ville «ne veut pas que personne n’y aille, pour que ça serve de réserve écologique».
Faire des farces racistes sur les accents des Italo-Québécois n’a rien à voir avec la dénonciation de la pègre, qu’elle soit d’origine italienne (Mafia, Camora, n’Drangheta et), québécoise ou canadien anglophone (les motards) ou de groupes moins anciens (les dits “gangs de rue”).
La censure est étatique, ou religieuse dans des sociétés théocratiques. Un site web a tous les droits de biffer des affichages racistes, sexistes, homophobes et autres expressions haineuses. Comme les conneries que tu écris sur les gens sur l’aide sociale.
Je n’ai jamais été sur l’aide sociale, dieu merci, mais ça peut arriver à n’importe qui, surtout de nos jours où l’assurance-emploi n’assure presque personne…
Ian Lockwood is a familliar name to me; we’ve also got him working here in Mississauga to ‘create’ our ‘downtown,’ but my point is that I’ve seen him speak, and he is excellent.
I find it amusing that he talks about the analogy of cars-as-fluid; there actually is parts of traffic theorey derived from fluid flow models. I am intrigued by the idea of modelling traffic as a compressible gas as opposed to an incompressible liquid.
CBC did an excellent IDEAS show on traffic engineering in 2005 called “Traffic Jam” produced by Dave Redel. It is very educational in regards to both some of the technical aspects of traffic engineering as well as the pratfalls of highway design.
I found Michael’s points about the economic makeup of the city particularly interesting. I have put this very question, of how to accomodate seemingly vital traffic of goods and materials, to traffic engineers before and received the reply that “No city has ever regretted removing a highway”. While i am sympathetic to that rather facile response, i am curious about further exploration of the idea. I have worked in several cities in the US where the industrial base moved to the suburbs with regrettable consequences.