(UPDATED with late-night shots)
You’ve seen the original. Now the all-new sequel, following the storm of the year.
12 feet from the sidewalk. A new record. Not anymore. See below.
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Creative Parking 2
Creative parking
As the snow fell this weekend on Montreal, the post-snowfall ritual sprang into action. It usually starts with lots of people complaining about the fact that the snow hasn’t been plowed yet. The complaints come so fast I have a feeling they’re written before the snow starts falling in the first place. With the complaints come increasingly ludicrous suggestions on how to fix the problem, such as:
- Blowing snow onto lawns, which apparently exist everywhere downtown.
- Lifting the ban on Tempo tent car shelters, which displace snow from driveways.
- Adjusting clearing schedules so that politicians’ streets are cleared last, which I’m sure will be the most logistically easy thing ever to accomplish.
- Getting out of the business entirely and give us our tax money back.
Almost all the letters are ignorant of just how much organization goes into plowing streets in Montreal, and assume that, without having spent a single second inside a snow plow, they know better how to efficiently clear streets.
Really, the complaints are more misplaced frustration at having to spend two hours digging out their car with a shovel when they were already late for work. Sadly, no magical solution has been found for that yet.
The city then gives a guesstimate about how long it will take to clear, overemphasizing the fact that more snow or rain will delay the operation.
Then, as the plows finally come by to clear the streets, car-owners who ignored no-parking signs panic to relocate them before getting a ticket.
The big difference this time is that the city decided to open up its paid parking lots for free overnight parking (when they’re not used anyway). Drivers can park their cars in them during snow-clearing operations, provided they get them out of there by 6am 7am (thanks Andy) the next day.
Except, because the move was poorly publicized (or because no one wants to get up that early), the lots sat unused this time.
So instead, drivers desperate for a place to park had to each solve the standard snowbank parking dilemma. When faced with a free spot knee-deep in snow, there are three options:
- Find some temporary place to stash the car and dig the spot out with a shovel, hoping nobody swoops in and steals the spot after you’ve cleared it (this also presents the recursive problem of where to put the car when you’re clearing the spot)
- Declare the spot unparkable, and keep going looking for another one, which most likely doesn’t exist
- Drive the car as far as it will go into the spot, and then give up, leaving it either parked diagonally, parked far from the curb, or both
The pictures below show some Montreal drivers who chose Option 3 on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.
TWIM: Parking and Wi-Fi
This week on This Week in Me:
I speak to Ville-Marie’s Jacques-Alain Lavallée about how complicated on-street parking restriction signs are in Montreal. I’d been bounced around through about four or five people talking about this subject, but settled on the borough since boroughs set the policies for on-street parking. He notes that a lot of the restrictions come by request from residents and businesses who want space for deliveries, diplomatic vehicles, etc.
Perhaps the only controversial statement was his answer to why the signs are unilingual French:
The city of Montreal is a French organization. The signs are pretty visual and easy to understand, but as a French organization, the law allows us to have a French-only policy. All the signage on autoroutes is French (except on bridges, which are federal jurisdiction).
I’m sure that’ll satisfy the tourists who are trying to figure out what “MAR-JEU” means.
Also this week, I have a bluffer’s guide on the health risks involved with Wi-Fi. (No link because it’s not online — Page B5 of Saturday’s paper). I’ll post it in a week when the copyright clears, but in a nutshell there’s no proof that electromagnetic radiation causes cancer. The only thing it can do to human tissue is heat it up a bit. Whether that may cause long-term health effects is up for debate, but I find it unlikely to have a statistically significant impact.
A bicycle path isn’t the end of the world
Store owners are greedy. It’s hard to blame them, since the business they do is directly proportional to the money they get. A few slow weeks could put them out of business.
But the store owners are very pro-car. They want parking spaces. And when those spaces are taken away for reserved bus lanes on Park Ave., expanded sidewalks on Decarie Blvd., or a bike path on de Maisonneuve Blvd., they start screaming bloody murder. No thought is given to the idea that increased public transit might compensate for the loss of parking spaces, or to the idea that beautification of the area might encourage pedestrian traffic.
Instead, we get sky-is-falling exaggerations like this one:
“It could turn downtown into a ghost town,” he warned.
Really? A ghost town? When has a bicycle path ever turned a metropolis’s downtown into a ghost town?
“It’s an open-air shopping mall and people, especially higher-end customers, want to get there by car.”
“Who wants to go to a high-end restaurant by bus or by métro?” Parasuco asked.
Oh. Think of the embarrassment that would ensue if a high-end customer had to take - gasp - public transit!
Or they could just take a cab.
The problem with downtown parking is already there. People with cars go to Wal-Mart and Loblaws where ample parking is available. They park at strip-malls and go into the stores there. A trip downtown means circling for half an hour looking for a space at a meter.
The solution to this problem isn’t to encourage more cars, which is an entirely unsustainable idea. It’s to encourage public transit, walking and cycling as alternative methods of getting around.
Turn downtown into a pedestrian haven, and suddenly people are walking around doing a lot of shopping.
UPDATE: The Gazette agrees with me. And so does letter-writer Kim Smart.
