From Parking Lots to Streetcar City
In 2003, city councillor Robert Libman tried vainly to eliminate some of the 240 surface parking lots in the city, to reuse them for housing, parks or public meeting places. Of course the parking lot owners opposed it - it’s a license to print money. I just don’t see why they can’t be converted to underground, privately-operated parking ramps, or the spaces moved to edge-of-town park-and-ride facilities, as used in so many US cities.
For a city that has the least green space of any North American metropolis, making new parks would seem to be a priority. (And calling a strip of weeds next to a building a “park” doesn’t help.) Parking lots contribute contaminated runoff to sewers, create heat island effects, and encourage the unsustainable drive-in culture we’ve stuck ourselves in.
We still have a chance to make major arteries in Montreal car-free or at least decrease car traffic. There are encouraging signs that streetcars may make a comeback along Parc Avenue and maybe Notre-Dame West, if the Port of Montreal’s plans to revitalize the Peel basin succeed. It’s perfectly possible to compromise - to make large stretches of certain streets accessible to public transit, taxis, pedestrians and bikes only, or, like Prince Arthur, to cross-traffic only.
State Street in Madison, WI is an example, with wide and low sidewalks that blur the distinction between areas, in favour of the pedestrians. There’s lots of street furniture, one-way sections, traffic calming devices, etc. Certainly Sainte-Catherine between Atwater and Papineau could be redone this way.
Madison also puts 3-level parking ramps around the Isthmus’ downtown core, encouraging people to leave their cars there and walk.
Portland, Oregon has free public transit within their 100 central city blocks.
By putting more parking around commuter rail stations, increasing suburban bus frequency (that connects to commuter rail or the Metro) and by being creative with things such as taxi-bus service, shuttle buses, carpooling and attendant financial incentives, we can perhaps reverse the decline that a century of car traffic have done to this city.
I’d go further - I’d want to do a Boston-style Big Dig and bury the elevated expressways that come flying off the Montreal escarpment, killing the ecosystem of the slope, and marginalizing all the neighborhoods beneath them. There have been long-mooted plans to cover up the Decarie and Ville-Marie trenches- creating something like Portland, Oregon’s 18-block-long Park Blocks. If we can rebuild the Pine-Park interchange, surely we can demolish the Decarie Circle.
July 3, 2003 4:19 PM
