Remember back when I suggested that the new Opus smart-card transit pass was working well (at least relative to the disastrous magnetic card)?
Well, now that the STM is forcing all students to get Opus cards, it seems problems are arising with those as well, as this post suggests. And lineups and delays are leading (indirectly) to kids getting ticketed for not having the passes on them.
Hey, remember back in June when I told you about that AMT contract to run two new express bus routes with crazy perks like air conditioning? And then two months later everyone hears about it for the first time (thanks to a press release) and is immediately outraged, saying this is “two-tier transit” and it’s illegal demanding it be scrapped?
Well you’ll be pleased to know that the Quebec government has done exactly that, bending to municipal pressure (and unions) and putting the kibosh on the project, mere days before it was to go into service.
Actually, it’s not really suspending it. Instead, the minister has taken the contract from Limocar and given control of the Vaudreuil line to CIT La Presqu’ile, which serves local transit needs of the western shore.
Of course, that’s what should have been done in the first place. The regional transit authorities around Montreal all have express buses going onto the island, including the RTL, STL, CITSO and companies that run transit in towns you didn’t realize had transit systems. Even CITPI has routes that connect with the STM network at John Abbott College in Sainte Anne de Bellevue. Why spend gobs of money on a private contract when you can just let the local transit authority handle it?
And even if we concede that the AMT needed to hire a company to run this route, why the requirements for air conditioning, Wi-Fi access and the rest that instantly disqualified the transit companies from the process? The government has been clear in the past that air conditioning is a luxury and they won’t pay for buses to have them. So why did AMT get special treatment?
Mentioning the delay between my reporting in June and the decision this past week isn’t just to make me look good. There are consequences to going back on decisions like this. Limocar went through a fair bidding process in good faith, and now they’ve been screwed over. It’s unclear whether they’ve spent any serious money setting this route up, but even if we just count the manpower they spent on the bidding process, that’s a lot of resources for something that has turned out to be irrelevant.
In other words, expect a lawsuit to develop out of this, or expect Limocar to get some serious cash in severance costs.
And, of course, all that is money out of our pockets.
All because people complained about a contract after it was awarded instead of when the ridiculous requirements were announced.
After recent injuries to pedestrians due to rear-view mirrors on STM buses, some are asking why these predatory reflective objects are allowed to keep recklessly and deliberately attacking poor bystanders whose only crime was standing less than four inches from the driver’s side of a moving bus.
The STM has refused to retrofit their buses in order to remove these threats to our (taller) children, even after discovering that people can get hit with them.
This is about safety. The ability of a bus driver to look at himself or look back at roads he’s already driven through should not get in the way of keeping our streets safe for pedestrians.
We must not rest until our buses are mirror-free.
Apparently, the city council in Westmount isn’t keen on the idea of a high-speed rail link between downtown and the airport going through their little town on the lines currently used by the AMT commuter trains going to Windsor Station. Instead, they’d prefer if the route used tracks further south in St. Henri.
The reasoning is somewhat complicated, and has to do with some very technical aspects of the two tracks. In order to better explain it, I’ve created a diagram of the situation below:
As you can see, it’s better for everyone involved if the train uses the lower tracks.
(I realize this is classic NIMBYism and not specific to Westmount, but you’d think it would occur to them that such a suggestion without any reasons behind it would lead to this kind of impression.)
UPDATE: Aww Pat, I’m touched (again). Your kickback will be in the mail shortly. Pour vos lecteurs, vous pouvez lire mes billets sur les médias, Montréal et, surtout, sur Patrick Lagacé.
As part of its promise for vastly increased service for users (and in order to meet government-imposed quotas to get extra cash), the STM has announced sweeping improvements to bus service across the island, as well as better service on the Orange Line of the metro (which will now use renovated MR-73 trains exclusively), all starting next Monday (Sept. 1) as the new schedules are released.
The actual improvements to bus service aren’t quite as dramatic as the long press release would make it seem. Part of the reason is that the STM simply doesn’t have enough buses to meet up with all the increased service it wants. More are being manufactured, but won’t arrive here until next year.
Nevertheless, there are some highlights in the new schedules:
The 480 Pointe-Nord Île-des-Soeurs route, which was first announced back in April, finally gets started. It’s an express link between downtown and Nuns’ Island’s new Bell campus. That route will also be paired with a collective taxi service which will run between the campus and Nuns’ Island’s commercial area during lunchtime.
What do you do when a pilot project fails miserably? Try it again in another place without changing any of the things that were wrong with it, of course. After trying “seniors” routes in NDG and Côte des Neiges, the STM is repeating the experiment in Montreal North, Saint Michel and Rosemont.
Like the previous incarnation, these buses will only run on certain days (and it’s not the same days for each bus), during midday, on a confusingly circular route at unreasonably large intervals of between 50 and 80 minutes. The latter two will also use minibuses, which are high-floor buses (it’s unclear if they’ll have lifts like adapted transit buses do) and tough to get into for older people.
The stops will be identified with the same yellow signs as the previous versions, even though yellow signs also indicate temporary routes (like the shuttle running through Georges-Vanier metro) and tourist routes (like the 515 Old Port bus)
As part of its incremental increases to service to the 470 Express Pierrefonds, a route described (repeatedly) as a “home run” by STM director Marvin Rotrand, the STM has finally added weekend service for the first time. Service will be provided in both directions between 6:30am and 6:30pm, at intervals ranging from 20 minutes (during weekend rush-hour times) and 30 minutes (around noon). That’s great, only it took them a year to do it.
Service intervals on the 103 Monkland will drop dramatically next week during all hours of service. On weekdays during the day, intervals will be closer to 10-12 minutes than the current 15-20, and during rush hour it will drop below the 6-minutes-or-less threshold.
On Saturdays, morning eastbound service will be at 15 minutes instead of 20. Westbound, intervals will drop from 20 minutes to 15 from 1-4pm, and from 30 minutes to 20 minutes during the evenings.
Sunday’s schedule stays mostly the same.
Following up on a promise to offer late-evening service to certain routes, new schedules for five seven-day routes show less truncated weekday schedules, which will now end closer to the metro’s closing time of 1am. Weekend service, however, will remain unaffected and still end as early as previously:
Anyone who’s tried to get around the West Island early on a Sunday morning quickly realized that it’s not possible before 9am. For some arcane reason, service starts at 7am on Saturdays, but everyone’s expected to just sleep in on Sundays. Only certain routes like the 68 or 211 offer any service before 9am. That changes next week, as the late-rising routes through Fairview start getting up at 7am instead of 9:
Perhaps there was a mixup of some sort. But comparing schedules, it seems there are actually slight reductions in the service on two routes where the STM has advertised slight increases:
UPDATE: The papers have stories on the schedule changes. La Presse, notably, mentions nothing about the 470 weekend service nor the earlier Sundays for routes going through Fairview. I guess they think the West Island doesn’t matter.
Ad for Terry DiMonte in Monday's Gazette
Corus announced today that Terry DiMonte, the former CHOM morning man who left for Q107 in Calgary because CHOM wasn’t prepared to offer him a long-term contract, will return to Montreal’s airwaves starting Sept. 8 with a noon-hour talk/music show on Q92.
What’s missing from Corus’s press release, and the Presse Canadienne rewriting of it, is that DiMonte isn’t physically returning to Montreal. He’s still hosting his morning show in Calgary. Only now, after his morning shift, he’ll stay in studio and do the Montreal show remotely.
This isn’t the first time that a broadcaster has done “local” programming remotely and tried to fool people (Joe Cannon was famous for it and Global Quebec is introducing it), but the fact that Corus left it out of its press release suggests that their goal is to deliberately mislead Montreal listeners.
Fortunately, I’m relatively confident DiMonte has the moral fortitude not to outright lie to his listeners (saying “here in Montreal” or pretending his weather is the same as ours).
You know, part of the problem of having other people pick names for you is that sometimes they pick stupid names.
It’s even worse if “other people” is “the general public”
(Full results, including Vancouver and Toronto. Canada and China are the only countries represented by more than one city.)
UPDATE: The loser cities are taking it in stride:
Media outlets not used to issuing corrections will tend to want to downplay them. Some (like CTV) will call them “clarifications” even if they’re outright falsehoods, to make it seem less serious.
A similar thing happens at the West Island Chronicle, which issued this “clarification” for an article it printed last week (which is no longer online):
In an article called “Catering to a tinier crowd,” (The Chronicle, Aug. 13, 2008, Back to School p. 3), it was implied that Yummy Tummy Catering will provide individual hot lunches for schoolchildren as well as for larger daycare centre orders. The company will only provide cold lunches for individual order. The article also implied the catering company was told by Lester B. Pearson school board it could go meet with individual schools to see whether or not they could do business with them. However, this was the company’s own initiative. Yummy Tummy can be contacted at 514-967-9318, not the number reported erroneously in the original article. The Chronicle regrets the error.
First of all, there is more than one error here. “Clarification” and “error” should be plural.
The first error says that it was “implied” that the company would provide individual hot lunches. But the article more than implied it:
When Andrea Levy and Stacey Park noticed some of their acquaintances simply did not have the time to prepare food for their children to take to school but did not want to leave them without a home-cooked meal for lunch, they had an idea. … “Not everybody takes part in the hot lunches (provided) at the schools,” explained Levy … The idea is to provide hot lunches to kids who need it at school … Officials at the latter told them they would have to meet with individual schools to find out where hot lunches are provided …
The second and third errors are simple factual errors (bad phone numbers are a common problem, and this one was off by one digit).
This isn’t a clarification, it’s a series of corrections.
Let’s get it right next time, folks.
The City of Pierrefonds is celebrating its 50th anniversary this weekend, despite the minor detail that it no longer exists.
(A comment could be made here about these municipal and borough-funded parties that only civil servants and their friends even know about, and how they waste taxpayer money on things that are completely pointless, but that’s another post)
Gazette photographer Allen McInnis is putting up some initial posts on a style-spotting blog called Street Views.
There’s an opening. I guess that means the current host isn’t coming back (perhaps putting too much faith in a Cory Doctorow endorsement).
Quebec Superior Court has sided with the media in a legal battle with police over notes, video and photos from the April 21 Habs riot. The material, which was seized by search warrant after the event, will be returned - unopened - to the media outlets they came from.
When I first wrote about the battle in April, I was unsure of my position, but leaning toward the idea that because journalists did not make any promises of anonymity to their subjects, there should be no reason why they can’t co-operate with police.
But after the more recent riot in Montreal North, where a La Presse photographer was attacked, I’m leaning more toward the idea that journalists can’t do their jobs properly if they can be forced to act as an arm of law enforcement (especially when that law enforcement sits blocks away waiting for backup while the journalists enter the war zone).
I won’t for a moment defend rioters, but I take some comfort in the legal precedent that journalists won’t be seen as cops. Of course, anything they end up publishing can still be used by police, so it’s still a good idea to avoid journalists, or not riot in the first place.
A double dose from yours truly today:
This week’s Justify Your Existence is an interview with a member of Anonymous, the anti-Scientology group. Though she’s unnamed, you’ll recognize her as the same young woman I made fun of talked about earlier when a video was posted on YouTube in which she said Scientology conspired to get her fired from her job. Though I suggested she was weird, to her credit, she was willing to sit down with me and explain herself. Reaction on their forums is starting to build here.
There’s also a protest today at 11 near Lafontaine Park, for anyone interested.
UPDATE: For those of you who are reading this article because it was posted on the Anonymous forums and have never read it before, Justify Your Existence by its very nature takes a tough stand against its interview subjects — part of the reason it’s tough getting interviews sometimes.
Also, from the Enterbulation forums:
NO WAY!!!!
His name is Steve Fagay?????
Actually, no it’s not. But I’m touched by the maturity.
Finally, I’ve already got hate mail. Sweet.
This week’s Bluffer’s Guide is about the Buffalo Bills game in Toronto this week, and what the NFL testing the waters in Canada could mean for our national football game. There’s suggestion that the Bills might move to Toronto after its current owner dies and the franchise is sold off. Such a move, worryers say, would spell the end to the Toronto Argonauts, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and probably even the CFL itself.
It comes the same day as this piece from The Gazette’s Herb Zurkowsky, quoting league officials worried about the NFL threat. He also has some interesting history in his notes that I wish I’d stolen from is useful for context.
UPDATE (Aug. 21): A reader points out that other NFL games have taken place on Canadian soil. This will be the first time that regular-season games take place in Canada, however.
You can tell a story is dominating the news when media outlets are climbing over each other to get any details they can label as “exclusive.” So far The Gazette (proudly) and the Journal/TVA/LCN (multiple times over) have joined in the game, getting their hands on details of the Fredy Villanueva case. La Presse, where are you?
The Société de développement environmentale de Rosemont (yeah, I didn’t know they existed either) is sponsoring a guided bicycle tour of the borough’s environmental-friendliness. Perhaps more interesting is that at least one bike shop (Bicycle Beaubien) will be on hand to help you out with any bike needs and there will be some free food, all on the city’s dime.
Route for SODER's bicycle tour of Rosemont
The tour starts at Bellechasse and 16th Ave. at 1:30pm on Saturday (Aug. 16). For more information, consult the press release (PDF).
Thank you, No One is Illegal Montreal, for setting the record straight on the shooting of Fredy Villanueva. It wasn’t an accident, nor the actions of a frightened police officer with inadequate training. It was obviously the expression of the “killer cop’s” blood lust for murdering brown people in cold blood.
Oh, and the riot was justified and rioters aren’t criminals.
“No justice, no peace” indeed. (Doesn’t that just mean “wage war until you get what you think you deserve?”)
CTV Montreal issued a rare on-air apology today to Pointe Claire Mayor Bill McMurchie for saying he spent $23,600 on meals at taxpayer’s expense (about $65 a day):
Last July 15, we reported on several occasions that Bill McMurchie, mayor of the city of Pointe-Claire, had spent $23,600 on meals at taxpayers’ expense.
We wish to clarify that the mayor actually spent less than $1,500 on meals during 2007 as shown in a statement prepared by Lyne Goulet, Pointe-Claire city treasurer and posted on the city’s web site.
CTV apologizes to Mayor McMurchie and the elected council of Pointe-Claire for any embarrassment or prejudice that may have been caused.
I can’t find the original story, since CTV Montreal doesn’t archive its news, so I have to go on what’s being written here.
But “clarify”? You inflated a figure more than ten-fold, accusing a man of corruption and left the record unfixed for almost a month, and you’re clarifying?
Unless I’ve missed something, this is a correction. And a major one.
St. Jacques Street, looking east from Madison
St. Jacques Street in NDG has a reputation, and not a good one. It’s lined mostly with used car dealerships, auto repair shops, seedy motels and deteriorating parking lots. The neighbourhood around it is known more for being on the “wrong side of the tracks” than anything else.
The borough, as part of its master plan, is trying to change all that. It’s proposing a by-law (PDF) that would disallow the creation of new gas stations, auto parts shops and car dealerships on St. Jacques between Madison and the Decarie expressway. Instead, it wants to see more other kinds of commerce (restaurants, grocery stores and the like) on the south side and more residential development on the north side.
Midas shop on St. Jacques
While some major franchises are located in this area (such as this Midas shop and an Ultramar gas station), the vast majority are Mom & Pop shops with fading signs and improvised setups.
The draft by-law, which will see public consultation next month, would not force these businesses to close. But it would prohibit new ones from forming in their places if they do.
Traffic sign gives taxis special privileges at Peel and René Lévesque
So what is it about taxis, anyway, that gives them all this special treatment on our roads? Above, left turns are prohibited on René Lévesque Blvd. in order to keep traffic flowing smoothly. But taxis, for some reason, are exempt from this rule. So if a taxi wants to turn left, it can just sit there in the middle of the intersection waiting for an opportunity to do so.
But what’s more frustrating is that taxis get to use Montreal’s reserved bus lanes, whether or not they are carrying any passengers. Why is that? Are taxis considered small buses? Does a taxi carrying one person pollute less than a personal car carrying one person? Are taxis so vital to the economy that they should be exempt from downtown traffic?
My attempts to find an explanation have so far been fruitless. As far as I can tell, the reasoning behind it is the same as that which gives newspapers an exemption from Canada’s Do Not Call List regulations: Taxis have a very powerful lobby.
