Newspaper articles - Les journaux

[JNvillage]

An article in the Gazette sums it up nicely:

http://www.montrealgazette.com/story_print.html?id=1462634

Urban highways revisited

By Michelle Lalonde, The GazetteApril 3, 2009

U.S.-based design experts Paul Moore (left) and Ian Lockwood survey a section of the Turcot Interchange in the Cote St. Paul neighbourhood on April 1, 2009. The two are in Montreal this week to study the city's worst urban highway spots.

U.S.-based design experts Paul Moore (left) and Ian Lockwood survey a section of the Turcot Interchange in the Cote St. Paul neighbourhood on April 1, 2009. The two are in Montreal this week to study the city's worst urban highway spots.
Photograph by: John Mahoney, The Gazette

As Quebec’s Transportation Department prepares to spend billions to expand or rebuild several throughway projects on the island of Montreal, a growing chorus of community leaders is urging Montreal to put the brakes on these 1950s-style highway projects and embrace a healthier vision for the city.

Urban freeways – like Highway 25, the planned Notre Dame St. expansion and sprawling spaghetti interchanges like the Turcot – are being demolished in many U.S. cities as communities realize these structures have done nothing, but depress and segregate the neighbourhoods they slice through, aggravate problems like obesity and smog-related illnesses, and encourage an exodus of jobs and residents to the suburbs.

On Friday, Montreal’s public health department invited 200 community leaders to a workshop where U.S. transportation experts urged Montreal not to follow the car-centric vision of many U.S. cities.

Montreal should instead begin to replace its urban highways with a network of “human-scale” streets that contribute to city life, said Paul Moore, a transportation engineer based in Atlanta, Ga.

“This is an unbelievable opportunity that Montreal has right now,” Moore said.

“Your community is getting ready to spend more than $3 billion on highway projects. That kind of spending is not going to happen again for a generation. A mistake at this point would represent a major opportunity lost.”

Moore said his home city of Atlanta is finally realizing that its own series of freeways crisscrossing the city have hurt the city economically and socially. Now Atlanta is moving to dismantle some of its freeways and replace them with smaller, walkable and cycle-friendly streets where people want to live and work (and pay taxes).

Ian Lockwood, a transportation planner based in Orlando, Fla., told the conference Montreal still has time to change direction.

“Montreal could be such a great place, and it already is to some extent. But other cities are getting their act together on these transportation issues, and you are falling behind,” he said.

Lockwood said highways are great for moving people and merchandise between cities, but they should stop at city limits and be replaced by smaller streets that serve a community.

“Highways are about long trips. Cities are about short trips,” Lockwood said. “Highways are about speed. Cities are about access.”

Dr. Louis Drouin of Montreal’s public health department said he organized the conference because he wanted to encourage exchanges between transportation experts and the many groups in Montreal now galvanizing to oppose the highway projects.

He is concerned bigger highways in the city bring big health problems, like more traffic collisions, smog-related illnesses, social alienation and poverty.

“We in public health are sometimes accused of promoting public health to the detriment of the economy,” Drouin said. “But sustainable development is all about improving the economy by improving the prospects for the city core.”

On Wednesday, Drouin invited Lockwood and Moore on a minibus tour of the key highway projects planned by the province. Also on the bus were community activists, Transport Department officials, public health workers, and journalists.

Lockwood said he was disturbed by most of what he saw and heard. “I feel like I’m in a time warp,” Lockwood said, after learning about the plans to “modernize” Notre Dame St. East into what the Transportation Department calls an “urban boulevard.”

Notre Dame as it is, a six-lane roadway that separates neighbourhoods from the waterfront, is already “antisocial” and “so ugly that if it were an animal we would shoot it”, he said.

But plans to widen the road from six to eight lanes and dig a 1.5-kilometre trench like the Décarie Expressway, will only make it worse, he said. And since only a half dozen streets will allow for pedestrian crossing along the nine-kilometre stretch, and traffic lights will be frozen on green for the cars during rush hours, it can hardly be labelled a boulevard.

“It’s like we are in 1965, as if we are trying the same (congestion) solutions that don’t work over and over again and hoping for a different outcome. And they are telling us it will work this time. It’s the definition of insanity.”

Study after study has shown that adding capacity to highways only relieves congestion for a few years, he said. Highways in cities encourage people to move to the suburbs, Lockwood said, especially since city neighbourhoods are being ruined by highways. But very quickly, because of this exodus, highways fill up again with commuting vehicles, and there are calls for expansion.

Lockwood scoffed at the idea of the Notre Dame plan being called an “urban boulevard” project.

“It is distracting when people call a modified highway an urban boulevard,” he said.

He defined an urban boulevard as a “walkable, contributing street, with businesses and restaurants that are functioning, with intersections you can cross, and with parking along it,” so businesses can thrive.

Plans to demolish the Turcot Interchange and replace it with a surface highway on raised embankments did not meet with greater approval.

But the Harbourfront commission’s plan to demolish the Bonaventure Expressway where it enters the downtown core and replace it with a surface level street sounds reasonable, Lockwood said.

Lockwood and Moore suggested that highways along the southern waterfront of the island should be replaced with several parallel city streets, separated by city blocks that could be developed. The railway lines and yards along the water should be moved and the waterfront reclaimed for bike paths and boardwalks and residential and commercial development. The Turcot should come down, and be replaced by several city streets and roundabouts.

Moore said he did not see anything wrong with the new bridge to Laval, but once Highway 25 hits the island, it should morph into a regular street or streets with pedestrian crossings and slower speed limits, to serve the communities it crosses.

John Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee and now the director of an urban planning institute, also had some frank advice for Montreal, particularly about plans for Notre Dame Blvd.

“If the province of Quebec succeeds in building Notre Dame, for example, the way it is planned ... it is a breathtakingly stupid mistake.”