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Montréal Transit Developments

lawwt said:
A small article on the (in)accessibility of the metro system. The STM is currently in the process of retrofitting its stations but there are huge accessibility gaps that make it difficult for lots of the population to access the metro.

medium.com

4 Days 4 Lines — Montreal Metro’s (In)Accessibility

68 stations and 8600+ stair-steps later, I pose a design challenge to Montrealers
medium.com medium.com

This article on touches on stairs but there are many other aspects that make it hard for people including those god forsaken lever style doors that are almost impossible to open sometimes in the winter
Click to expand...

If you look in the earlier pages of this thread, this has already been extensively discussed. It's well known that STM is not the shining example of accessibility access. It'll be years before all stations can be retrofitted. Fortunately, this won't be the case for REM.

Also, a bit perplexed by this article:

As we enthusiastically arrived at McGill metro’s Union entrance, we faced a design conundrum and had to change our plan. At that entrance, there was an escalator to come up to the ground but only stairs to access the metro station.
Click to expand...

I'm a bit confused by what he's trying to get at, because:

1) This is not a Montreal-specific design issue. Most stations on TTC, Vancouver Skytrain, and many European systems are built this way.
2) Not every single entrance of a station needs to be retrofitted with escalators going up and down. If you absolutely need an escalator, just use another station entrance. In his example, McGill station is huge, with multiple station exits leading to street level plus many more leading into the nearby Centre Eaton and department stores. If he really needs to get to say St. Catherine street level with escalators, simply use the Centre Eaton exit.

Furthermore, some of his other statements are even more bizarre, especially from a transit planning perspective:

Yes, buses are a potentially great alternative ... [but] buses do not contribute to Montreal’s mission of reducing carbon emissions.
Click to expand...

Yes, Bixi is wonderful and I prefer a shared system over individual bicycles but it comes at a yearly subscription cost as well. The Bixi service is also not yet equitably spread across the city.
Click to expand...

Bixi has 611 stations spread across the island, arguably one of the largest public bike shares in North America. And if you aren't willing to pay for the $50-70 yearly subscription (with discounts), including access to Bixi Electric bikes, then I don't know what to say...
 
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NY99 said:
Your logic is useless here. All this person wants to do is bash Toronto, despite knowing what they’re saying is easily disprovable.

according to them, Toronto is a culinary wasteland devoid of anything but “MacDonalds”, a restaurant which cool bohemian Berlin obviously doesn’t have 🙄

Toronto can be annoyingly small-minded at times, but even given that, this city is seeing more growth and change than any other major city on the continent — bar none. For way too many metros, a project like the Finch LRT or even the Kipling bus terminal (god forbid) would be seen as the signature transit project of the decade. For us? Those are mere drops in a massive, massive bucket. No one in North America is building transit anywhere near as much as us. And more than just transit, we’ve got vibrant new neighbourhoods being born all over the city — at the Don Lands, East Bayfront, East Harbour, the Christie Lands, Square One, VMC, and around practically every single mall in the GTA. The pace of change we’re seeing is incredible. Our already great city is getting better and better every year

yeah we’ve got areas of concern, and yeah progress feels like a constant drawn-out battle — two steps forwards and one step back. But it’s really easy to lose perspective of just how good we have it here. Toronto is amazing, not just for what it is but for what it could be, and really does seem to be becoming.

thanks for coming to my Ted talk
Click to expand...
Everyone knows that Berlin is a Burger King town. Stop saying nonsense.
8302D6D2-5FC6-44D3-B50B-C1DC128D2B42.jpeg
 
SFO-YYZ said:
I'm a bit confused by what he's trying to get at, because:

1) This is not a Montreal-specific design issue. Most stations on TTC, Vancouver Skytrain, and many European systems are built this way.
2) Not every single entrance of a station needs to be retrofitted with escalators going up and down. If you absolutely need an escalator, just use another station entrance. In his example, McGill station is huge, with multiple station exits leading to street level plus many more leading into the nearby Centre Eaton and department stores. If he really needs to get to say St. Catherine street level with escalators, simply use the Centre Eaton exit.

Bixi has 611 stations spread across the island, arguably one of the largest public bike shares in North America. And if you aren't willing to pay for the $50-70 yearly subscription (with discounts), including access to Bixi Electric bikes, then I don't know what to say...
Click to expand...

In this specific instance about McGill station I think he is referencing to the fact that there are no accessible ways to get from the concourse level of the station down to track level. Despite there being multiple accessible entrances into the station itself, the final leg down from the concourse to track level is stairs only.

SFO-YYZ said:
Bixi has 611 stations spread across the island, arguably one of the largest public bike shares in North America. And if you aren't willing to pay for the $50-70 yearly subscription (with discounts), including access to Bixi Electric bikes, then I don't know what to say...
Click to expand...

I mean sure but the Bixi bikes get put away in the winter so you're still out of luck for almost half the year.
 
NY99 said:
Your logic is useless here. All this person wants to do is bash Toronto, despite knowing what they’re saying is easily disprovable.

according to them, Toronto is a culinary wasteland devoid of anything but “MacDonalds”, a restaurant which cool bohemian Berlin obviously doesn’t have 🙄

Toronto can be annoyingly small-minded at times, but even given that, this city is seeing more growth and change than any other major city on the continent — bar none. For way too many metros, a project like the Finch LRT or even the Kipling bus terminal (god forbid) would be seen as the signature transit project of the decade. For us? Those are mere drops in a massive, massive bucket. No one in North America is building transit anywhere near as much as us. And more than just transit, we’ve got vibrant new neighbourhoods being born all over the city — at the Don Lands, East Bayfront, East Harbour, the Christie Lands, Square One, VMC, and around practically every single mall in the GTA. The pace of change we’re seeing is incredible. Our already great city is getting better and better every year

yeah we’ve got areas of concern, and yeah progress feels like a constant drawn-out battle — two steps forwards and one step back. But it’s really easy to lose perspective of just how good we have it here. Toronto is amazing, not just for what it is but for what it could be, and really does seem to be becoming.

thanks for coming to my Ted talk
Click to expand...
I expect a lot of us UrbanToronto followers are just impatient. I think many of us at some point in our lives have left home, seen the world, and despaired at how much exciting and beautiful stuff is out that we don't have at home. However, cliché though it may be, Rome was not built in a day. I took a course dedicated to the history of Berlin while I was working on my Minor in German at York U. For centuries Berlin was a mosquito-infested, second-rate capital city in the European hinterland. Berliners, even into the 20th century, were very self conscious of how their city compared to the great European capitals. However, over the centuries, it has become the fascinating and artistically & culturally rich city it is today.
Meanwhile, Toronto was incorporated as a colonial outpost city in 1837. We've been a going concern for five minutes.
Paris took a millenia to catch up to Rome. London took centuries to catch up to Paris. Berlin, for all its greatness, is still very much building and defining itself although it's had centuries to develop a richer patina of city life and architecture than Toronto.
We're young and still a little zit faced! For us the best is absolutely yet to come. The fact that some many of us long for a more beautiful and interesting city is a good sign that it's coming to us. But this will be a centuries-long process. To appreciate Toronto one must appreciate its youth and potential. We won't be young forever.
 
Translated from La Presse: EXCLUSIF Ligne bleue : projet de 2,5 milliards de Cadillac Fairview autour du terminus
The place, with 1 million square feet of office space, 5,000 housing units, new convenience stores, a linear park, with a subway and bus station as part, will become the "pole of the Eastern Renaissance," Brian Salpeter, senior vice president of development, Eastern Canada, for Cadillac Fairview, said during a meeting with La Presse.

...
Click to expand...
So it seems that the reason why Galeries d'Anjou is against the STM expropriation is because they plan to redevelop the parking lot where the station is as towers, while the STM wants to build incentive parking instead. But the mall oweners dont have a timeline for the development and blame the STM expropriation for that.
 
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