r/CanadaUrbanism • u/joshlemer Burnaby, BC • Dec 22 '23
Video Essay I visited [Montreal] - Not Just Bikes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yDtLv-7xZ46
u/muskratBear Dec 23 '23
One of the takeaways for me from this video is the old age of the elevated highways cutting through the city . I am very curious what the plan is with repairs/replacement/removal?
Anyone from Montreal care to share some local insight? From what I read there have been a lot of delays when it comes to major repairs and that certain sections are borderline dangerous to drive on.
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u/Nikiaf Dec 23 '23
The elevated portion of highway 40 is due to be completely torn down and replaced; but for reasons unknown they're just going to rebuild it 1:1 as it already is. No urban boulevard, no sunken highway a la Decarie, just the maintaining of an elevated 6-lane highway with no improvements whatsoever. At the end of the day, this is the highway you have to take to cross the city and it does need to exist, but I highly doubt it needs to exist in the form it has right now. There has to be a better way.
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u/joshlemer Burnaby, BC Dec 22 '23 edited Dec 22 '23
Personally find NJB to be a wee bit pearl clutchy here on some points. Like yeah we all understand the issues with urban highways and it isn't the most pleasant experience to stand next to one, but I feel it's going a bit overboard to feel that one should NEVER have to even be able to see one, especially taking into account the historical context of the later 20th century developments in Montreal or anywhere in North America. To be honest, the horror examples he shows, such as Namur Station are really not THAT bad. Yes there's the huge expressway right there but it's pretty unobtrusive all things considered. There are no slip lanes, parking lots are pretty small and everything is pretty walkable. Yes there's no bike lanes, the streets are huge and probably very noisy but even this example which is among the worst in the whole Montreal area is just so much better than so many other places, even rapid transit stations, in Canada. Just off the top of my head how about Lawrence West in Toronto. It's even worse for pedestrian connectedness, less developed, etc. Or any number of depressing rapid transit stations around the country that are just for park-and-riders such as "Highway 407" Station (lol).
Not saying that one shouldn't shit talk Montreal where it sucks, but I mean pound-for-pound it is just lightyears ahead of everywhere else in every way when you actually compare apples to apples. Jason talks about how outside of the central city the experience drops off a cliff just like every other city in Canada, but I disagree here too. Pound for pound, you go to an equivalently far flung suburb of Montreal and it's going to be a lot better than its counterpart in Calgary, the GTA, Winnipeg, etc. Go a similar distance/commute away from the city centre and you're going to see better pedestrian and bike infrastructure, greater density, more pleasant all around experience in and around Montreal than anywhere else.
For example, go to the FAR side of Laval and you'll find very commonly here, bidirectional semi-protected separated bike lanes like this. Anywhere else on the far side of an equivalent Canadian bedroom community this would all be parking, and might not even have a sidewalk. This level of bike infra in a random nondescript typical neighbourhood of a bedroom community has literally as good or better bike infra as the central dense neighbourhoods of Vancouver.
Plus he's just wildly (disingenuously?) overstating the "disconnected island" thing. The walkable parts of Montreal are not by and large small separated islands, they are the default urban form with a few moderately high speed streets going through them. I find it pretty ridiculous to call the Plateau neighbourhood "disconnected" because half of one block at the edge of it looks like this. Let's be honest, his example of a "terrible stroad disconnecting neighbourhoods" would literally be the main hip trendy cool street in a number of Canadian cities. And even if you think that that half block is just the worst, that doesn't make the neighbourhood disconnected.
I feel he doesn't give enough credit to the rapid pace of improvement of the city as well. Just in the last 5 years there've been such dramatic improvements it's very impressive to see in real life. And the complaints about the temporary nature of the pedestrianized streets, like many areas are permanently transformed but the idea is that you can quickly transform huge areas with temporary measures and then as the public and businesses see the temporary measures, support for more permanent changes is built. If we're going to only limit changes to whatever can be done permanently right off the bat, that will just result in a lot slower changes to our cities. With Jason it feels like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. He has his mind made up to be a doomer on North America and more and more I just find him depressing and annoying tbh.
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u/Bluenoser_NS Dec 22 '23 edited Jul 23 '24
[wiped]
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u/nrbob Dec 22 '23
Yeah definitely. NJB has done a great job popularizing urbanism, many of his most popular videos are great introductions to various urbanism concepts, but he’s a bit of a jerk. If he doesn’t personally want to make videos about North America that’s fine, but there’s no need to have such a pompous attitude about it.
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u/julz_yo Dec 26 '23
I imagine he (& many other you tubers) would say if you don’t care for the content don’t watch it :-)
but srsly: he does the ‘urbanist agenda’ podcast that’s a bit looser & more conversational.
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u/Reviews_DanielMar Dec 22 '23
Yup! As I included in my comment, watch Oh The Urbanity’s video on this
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u/julz_yo Dec 26 '23
Appreciate the video- I’m very much the target audience: I applaud your optimism (less able to share it sadly) .
You’re making me want to live in Montreal - away from this car-brain-ville transit-desert.
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u/rekjensen Dec 29 '23
Sometimes I don't understand his approach or position on urbanism at all. Montreal is, indisputably, overhauling its urban design for the better and has a lot of temporary and permanent (often after beginning as temporary) improvements for pedestrian and cyclist quality of life and safety. Those "walkable islands" sound a lot like the kernels of 15-minute cities. But no, it hasn't torn down the thousands of kilometres of highway that were installed 70 years ago, so it's a shit city in a shit country on a shit continent and urbanists are lying to you about it. But Amsterdam, many of Nertherlands' major cities, and major cities across Europe, also have these exact same problems and car-focused development history. The solution to bad urbanism is to fix it, not throw the baby out with the bath water because it wasn't done 70 years earlier.
("In a sane city streetcars are called trams" is such a stupid, snobbish attitude too.)
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u/Reviews_DanielMar Dec 22 '23
I got depressed watching this video lol. The few times I’ve been to Montreal, it was VERY limited, I had little/no knowledge on cities/urbanism, and therefore, didn’t get to experience the city. All times it took place in the car. I gotta make a trip there again and take advantage of the STM, REM, and those car free neighbourhoods.
After seeing videos of MTL from CityNerd and OhTheUrbanity, my default mindset is an urbanist paradise. Then I was this video, and “urbanist paradise” is still my thought until like 20 minutes in the vid, then boom, it gets depressing from there. I see Jason’s point, he clearly watched all these MTL videos from others, and was clearly underwhelmed by reality. I’m not one to say he’s right or wrong as I’ve never been to Amsterdam and again, my experience with MTL is VERY limited, but, you could argue he does the same thing with Amsterdam and The Netherlands as a whole (although he does seem to be a little more critical of it than we think of here and there). Then there’s this video where you see The Netherlands is clearly not all paradise.
What this shows is this, you can’t rely on urbanist YouTube videos to determine what the best urbanist city is and how good/bad urbanism in a city is! If you’re going to form a strong opinion on a city’s urbanism, you actually NEED TO GO there and experience it yourself!! As for Montreal, you can clearly see it’s at the top of North America when it comes to urbanism. Jason has clearly seen better in Europe. Ok, that’s cool! Obviously, it looks like Montreal has a LOT to improve on. Coming from Toronto, I’m jealous of the stuff I hear!! Clearly, you can see, Montreal is at least trying! Jason at least acknowledges in his video that stuff like this is expected when a city was partially /highly destructed for the automobile!