It’s about to get just a bit easier, and yet more difficult, to drive through Cartierville and Ville-Saint Laurent.
The city has presented its plan for making sure the residents on or near Toupin Blvd. don’t get overwhelmed with through traffic when Cavendish Blvd. is extended north to Henri-Bourassa.
The main focus is to get people coming to and from Laval to use the arteries: Highway 13 and Marcel-Laurin/Laurentien.
For the full details, you can see the slideshow (PDF), which has crazy details like counting the number of cars through each intersection and including the width of lanes and stuff.
But here’s the skinny for drivers:
- Vehicles will not be allowed straight through from Toupin onto Cavendish and vice-versa. Period.
- A dedicated bike lane will be installed on the Cavendish extension, and one of those middle-of-the-road bike lanes on Toupin Blvd. in both directions.
- A concrete median will be installed on Henri-Bourassa preventing traffic from turning left onto side streets to get around the restriction.
- Two streets east of Toupin will be made one-way (the directions above are random; it’s unclear which road is in which direction)
- A second left turning lane will be installed on Henri-Bourassa at Marcel-Laurin to accommodate an increase in traffic. Marcel-Laurin will be modified to better accommodate the traffic as well, including synchronized lights.
- Public transit on Henri-Bourassa will be modified in some mysterious way, also to coincide with a new train station at Highway 13 on the Montreal-Deux-Montagnes line.
- A troll will be stationed during rush hours on Toupin Blvd. and will spit at your car if it thinks you’re trying to find a shortcut to Laval.
OK, I made that last one up.
Sounds good, but… I thought that the *real* roadblock (actually, not real at all) to completing Cavendish was the complaints of residents in Côte-St-Luc. Have we found some kind of situation to appease them, or did we finally point out to them that they were the ones who moved on to a street that they KNEW was going to some day be connected to the A-40?
I like the blue arrows. I wish all road maps had giant blue arrows like that. Or at least that all city plans had blue arrows drawn on streets to make a point. I think more people would pay attention that way.
Or maybe it’s just me… because I happen to like blue… and giant arrows…
Linking Toupin and Cavendish is a great idea. But I’m surprised that linking Cavendish to Cavendish itself (i.e. over the tracks, between Ville-Saint-Laurent and Côte-Saint-Luc) isn’t considered a bigger priority. This roadway has been **begging** to be linked up for decades, and is more than adequate in terms of width to accomodate much more traffic on both sides. I’ve read somewhere that plans for such a link have been floated unsuccessfully since the ’60s, which is just staggering.
Anyone who’s had to deal with the junctions of autoroutes 15, 40, and 520 in rush hour knows what I’m talking about — it’s a freaking disaster zone in terms of urban planning.
If you’re coming from the airport, or from IKEA, and you just want to go back home to NDG or Côte-des-Neiges, you’re forced to get onto the 15 just to make it past this pointless bottleneck, often wasting a half-hour to ride the highway one exit down the road.
Any idea whether this link is still on the drawing boards? Thousands of motorists would be eternally grateful.
Motorists may be grateful, but Cote-St-Luc residents are steadfastly opposed to more traffic in their area. It’s still on the drawing board, but there’s been no serious moves toward actually constructing such a link.
Instead, the city is planning a compromise measure that would link Cavendish with Royalmount Ave. in the TMR industrial district. Whether that would change anything is anyone’s guess.
A station near A13 could also tie into the Doney Spur!
In transit, Andrew
It could be understood in the case of Côte-St-Luc that some (self) chosen people would not want to mingle with impure goys and thus keep Cavendish a dead-end (you can’t argue with God – after all, where in the old testament is it written that they shalt have consideration for thy goy neighbours???), and since the forced de-mergers, Côte-St-Luc is a separate city from Montréal (formerly known as St-Laurent), but in the case of Toupin/Cavendish, this is utter ridiculous as both streets are in the same city.
Prohibiting people from going through is just as stupid as the assholes in Montréal (formerly known as Ste-Geneviève and Pierrefonds) who don’t want people (except the buses and bicycles) going from crossing Pierrefonds on Jacques-Bizard.
The utter ridiculousness of nimbyes should be placated by massive violation of those ridiculous ordinance. If 2000 people violate it every day during a week, and they refuse to pay the ensuing tickets, the clogged court system ought to send a message to the powers that are.
It becomes necessary to amend the laws that rule municipalities to outlaw such stupid regulations, especially if those regulations force people to detour, as this increases greenhouse gas emissions.
The same goes for those suburban “stopvilles” where you have a stop sign every street for no other reason than to piss-off people from driving there, all the while increasing pollution.
(Another such unexplained stupidity is the “no right turn from Clarke” intersection at Clarke/Boulevard in Westmount).
What has come of this plan? Was it rejected, accepted, or put on hold?
As far as I can tell, the plan is still going forward, though there might be some give on specific traffic-calming measures.
Steve, do you remember (or have bookmarked) the MTQ site where you can download images of road signs? I can’t seem to find it. Perhaps they took it down?
http://www.mtqsignalisation.mtq.gouv.qc.ca/