New NJB: Montréal

One more PS: I remember my French Immersion teacher in the 1970s mourning about what a beautiful city Montreal used to be before they "ruined" it. I guess he must have lived or studied there before the 1960s passion for "modernization" hit, which came to Montreal just like everywhere else.

Eveline

*They should have read Bent Flyvbjerg's "How Big Things Get Done" first, but I guess they couldn't have since it was only published last year!

Eveline

Hi Jason, happy holidays! Well, there went my one hope for retiring to a decent city in NA (that's as if Canada would take us in the 1st place, but a girl can dream). I really appreciate the second part when you call out the absolute havoc and destruction wrought by Montreal following car/fossil fuel industry propaganda of the 50s and 60s in the neighboring US. This was of course with an implicit heavy dose of racism as the civil rights movement was really gaining momentum, a topic which does not get enough attention still in these convos. Since that was less of a factor in Canada, its so sad to see the demolition of good urbanism to punch land-hogging murderous highways throughout the island and the removal of streetcars. Same happened here. I am so glad to have your channel calling all of this out rather than trying to be glass half (if only!) full all the time. We live in an old streetcar neighborhood of Salt Lake City, now land of stroads. I could do a response video paralleling your Montreal critique point by point with examples from here, but worse. As I get older, I despair of the rest of my life living like this, even in my quite walkable, historic, mixed-use & mixed-density remnant island neighborhood. Voters passed a sales tax increase a few years back dubbed "Funding our Future" which is paying for some of the reconstruction backlog of city streets, often with bike and ped and traffic-calming infrastructure. But in project after project, the engineers still prioritize car throughput and curbside (and almost always free) private vehicle storage over all other modes. My supposed green neighbors proudly hosting their "Clean Air Now" yard signs scream bloody murder at the mere suggestion of removing any free parking. After a bitter fight a few years back over literally a handful of spaces to be able to add a roundabout at a 5-way mess of an intersection, it seems like city "leaders" have lost all appetite for any attempts at challenging the [mostly free] onstreet parking privileged public space. Two of the showcase projects put two-way cycle paths on one side of a couple of major streets. These have so many driveways and businesses/destinations on both sides and only narrow sidewalks on the other. They treated people riding bikes like cars - as recreation or getting through these areas, not as riding for transport, shopping, culture, etc. Another project illegally overrode the city's complete streets ordinance to avoid a 4-3 conversion with bike gutters. This is a major route 1 block from my place. I am still furious every time I travel the street, mostly on foot but even when I drive. It is super dangerous despite all the expensive new blinky ped crossing signals + those orange flags you love! It is a good grade for cycling and should have at least had gutters per ordinance, but instead it is now a death trap with excessive design speeds over the posted limit. Because of course it is. Given the expense, these key routes will likely never get properly redesigned in my lifetime. I am so upset every time I am on these, it makes my blood boil. And these are the "good" projects. The failure to create safe networks also means that few people are using the expensive new projects, leading some critics to whine about why any cycle infra was needed in the first place. Recently I attended the city mayor's ride to work event (name illustrative of how NA sees people on bikes still, if at all - maybe commuting or rec, rarely transport). Along one stretch the mayor and I were actually riding side by side. I mentioned a couple of issues and needs on the one protected bikeway we were on at that time (one I had sat on a committee to get installed in the 1st place years earlier in a past life as a paid advocate for sustainability). She retorted back "don't you ever have anything good to say about the city projects?!" Certainly, complaining is almost always easier than commending - but the constant disappointments and failures make it really hard to find anything even remotely positive to say, given the state of proper design in so many other places. Regarding giving up on NA episodes, I have been filming in SLC but can't get organized to edit or start a channel. Honestly, its too depressing. Lol this was supposed to be a comment about Montreal, but instead its my reaction to similar problems here. So I will keep watching your vids and dream of living somewhere we can not be enslaved by perpetual car dependence by design. Perhaps we will have to try to figure out how to retire to Europe, despite the rising neo-fascism there, too. Thanks for all you do.

Jen C

Thanks for your comment! However I disagree completely. I refuse to grade on a curve. North American urbanists are constantly applying an implicit "... by North American standards" caveat to everything they say, and they are not critical enough. We're expected to gush over extremely dangerous and poorly-designed infrastructure because it's a "step in the right direction", and anybody that complains is belittled. I know this, because I was constantly being told to "be thankful for what we have" when I would push for proper infrastructure while in Canada. There is a giant stroad around every corner in Montréal. Nobody talks about that. When you take transit, you are almost never at a "nice" destination - you're in the most car-centric place in the neighbourhood. It was very unpleasant. You may accept the "occasional wide street and freeway " but these are dealbreakers for me. You don't need to deal with this in most of Europe. It happens, but it's very rare. In Montréal it's everywhere. I do not want my kids to have to cross a 4-lane one-way road EVER. And the problem I have with a lot of urbanist feedback is that there's this implicit "yes, but it's getting better!" The issue is that European cities are also getting better, and they're improving at a faster rate. So the gap is only widening. Montréal is improving, but there are also huge amounts of new, car-dependent neighbourhoods being built all around it, which will only increase the pressure to make the city car-friendly to accommodate these people. I have decided not to make the Philadelphia video. What's the point? It's the same thing: this city was really nice, then it got bulldozed to build parking lots and highways, now it's going to take generations to recover. That's not an interesting story to me. I'm done visiting cities in North America (though I will probably have to go to New York some time for business with Nebula). Fundamentally though, I want to focus on GREAT examples of urban design on my channel, not mediocre-but-getting-better-slowly examples. I don't see value in being another channel that talks about how great some new bike lane with flexisticks is (because it's not). I want to talk about next-level solutions, like how bicycle traffic and car traffic can be completely separated by hoofdnetten, or how cities are implementing traffic circulation plans the way Groningen did. I will leave coverage of North American cities to North American creators.

Not Just Bikes

Hello Jason, Montrealer of seven years here. I loved so much of your analysis! You touched on many things that have bothered me about Montreal since I’ve become interested in Urbanism, such as the outside of Namur station. I’m glad someone shares my feelings about that place. You introduced me to some new issues that I’d never thought of as well, such as former streetcar streets. I agreed with almost every issue you raised, what I took issue with was the way you framed the video. You mainly judged Montreal by European standards, which is fine, but you didn’t take a moment to appreciate just how extraordinary it is that there’s a North American city that you can judge by ANY European standard. Instead, you said it “doesn’t hold a candle to the European greats” which made me feel like you buried the lede. You set Montreal up to fail by comparing it to the "Great" European cities. It seemed like the vast majority of your criticisms revolved around car-centric infrastructure rather than car dependency. There’s a big difference between the two. A street being wide doesn’t necessarily make it that much harder to walk from point A to point B. Even the neighbourhoods with the highest proportion of single-family homes (Town of Mount Royal, Hampstead, upper part of Westmount) aren’t that far from amenities and public transportation. You mentioned Sherbrooke in Westmount as a “Stroad” but I happen to live right next to that “stroad” and it gives me 15-minute access to almost any kind of business. You said that in Montreal you need to “carve out” an urbanist lifestyle, but unless you move way out into the suburbs, it’s more difficult to carve out a car-dependent lifestyle because of the lack of single-family zoning. This brings me to your point about “Urban islands.” I don’t think this is the right analogy. You said that the difference between Montreal and Toronto is that the urban islands in Montreal are just bigger, but there comes a point where a chain of islands becomes so big it can be considered its own continent. To demonstrate this, I’m going to take your statement that Montreal is like “Five good neighbourhoods in a trenchcoat.” Even if I could only choose five boroughs with the best urbanism; (Plateau, Southwest, Notre Dame de Grace/Cote Des Neiges, Villeray—Saint-Michel—Parc-Extension, Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie) That’s still a massive area. You can draw a line from the edge of Plateau to the edge of Rosemont that’s 8.46 kilometres long, and you can still travel a fair amount to the east after that without running into single-family zoning. That same distance in Toronto can take you from Harbourfront to North York in the north, Etobicoke in the west, and The Beaches in the east, all well into mainly single-family housing territory in a more populous city. I think a more appropriate way of describing Montreal would be as a continent of urbanism, with rivers and straits (Freeways, boulevards, stroads, etc.) i.e. the gaps in the urbanist fabric are fairly small. You mentioned online content that makes Montreal look great and how misleading it is, but this could simply be down to other Urbanist creators having different priorities when it comes to what makes a city great. You briefly mentioned the prevalence of neighbourhoods with middle housing mixed in with businesses, but to another urbanist, this by itself could go a long way in sealing the deal in favour of Montreal. For me, the occasional wide street and freeway are small prices to pay to live in a city where so many people can live in walkable neighbourhoods with easy access to transportation and the downtown area. I know this was long, but it's the longest video you've ever made, so it feels warranted. I'm looking forward to the Philidelphia video. That's another city I've heard a lot of hype about.

The network of interconnected private paths to avoid the cold reminds me of the network of connected air conditioned malls in Hong Kong. Have you visited/are you planning to visit Hong Kong any time soon? I would be curious to hear what you think about the city!