Hochelaga Car bar 1911.
Golden Chariot observation car launched in 1905, outside the Place Viger Hotel
New line starts on Sherbrooke West from NDG to Montreal West, August 13, 1908.
New line opens on Westmount Avenue, 1904.
Victoria and St. Catherine February 9, 1904.
Bleury Street 1904.
High tech snow clearing c. 1900
Clearing snow for the tram on St. Catherine 1902.
Hochelaga Car Barn 1899.
Place D'Armes 1896.
Early open electric car, 1893.
Look, I'm as nostalgic for the past as the next Anglo Montrealer, but were trams really all that good for the city?
ReplyDeleteDo you trust city hall to buy the best trams on the market? Or will they blindly give the contract to Bombardier, the company that couldn't even make a commuter train for the Two-Mountain run that could operate in -15C temperatures?
What happens in a blizzard and it takes a week to clear the snow, no tram service?
When a tram breaks down, it sits there and blocks traffic, it can't be pushed to the side of the road.
Ever go bike riding in Toronto? It sucks. Getting your wheel caught in a rail rut is not fun. Having the sky blotted out with overhead wires is ugly.
Instead of sinking all this money that we don't have into building a new infrastructure of tram lines, why not fix our overpasses, add more busses and upgrade the metro so that we're not packed like sardines every morning?
Jesus, they just finished digging up the last rails out of the street in front of my place a couple of years ago, do I have to listen to them lay them down again? It's taken over a year to fix boul St-Laurent, THE MOST IMPORTANT STREET IN THE CITY, how long do you think these layabout, incompetent, blue collared, unionized, city of Montreal butt pickers will take to lay tracks across our city and ruin yet more summers for us?
St Lawrence is the most important street in the city? According to what, your ouija board? Sherbrooke, St. Catherine, St. Denis, Dorchester are considerably more important than The Main.
ReplyDeleteModern streetcars are dreamboats, they're canoes gliding on concrete through urban lily pads, whereas buses are farting tin cans.
Ouija board? Yes, you're right. It was the spirits of dead businesses from The Main that asked this question: If it wasn't the most spiritually & culturally important street in the city, why would they call it The Main?
ReplyDeleteSte-Catherine is becoming an extended strip mall, and the others you mention are traffic arteries. I'm surprised you didn't mention Parc Ave, the Met and the Decarie expressway.
Besides the point. You're right, modern trams are beautiful. In cities that don't have -30c temperatures and that already have rails in the ground. I'll be dead by the time they finish installing the rails, and the city's economy will have died before that as closed off streets and road construction kill off more local businesses.
This city needs more mass transit and less cars. We need busses that were not designed by drunken monkeys with crayons, that don't sound like farting tin cans. And we need a serious upgrade to the metro, not 40 year old rolling stock with a few chairs removed.
If this were any other city I would agree with you 100%. I just don't trust the corruptaucracy to do anything right, we just finished paying for the Big Owe. I see any new mega-project as an opportunity to line everyone's pockets but mine...
C'mon St. Lawrence isn't even a two way street. It's kinda neat from Sherbrooke to Pine but after that it's somewhere on par with Fleury Boulevard, which at least has the two way thing happening.
ReplyDeleteMegaprojects = good.
Let's make the city great, not just functional.
I don't know why but for some reason, the comparison of St-laurent to Fleury made me burst out laughing.
ReplyDeleteThe Place d'Armes shot is amazing. The depth is compressed as only a telephoto lens can do, but isn't it a bit early for that?
ReplyDeleteActually, the two-way thing is bad for city streets. I noticed that when writing about the upper Main - once it goes two-way, north of Jean-Talon, it becomes a sort of dead urban expressway, not a neighbourhood main street at all.
ReplyDeleteSte-Catherine used to be two-way, amazingly enough for such a narrow city street (it's got to be the narrowest main shopping street in North America). Much better to have it one-way, too.