| The Gazette |
Friday, December 07, 2007
The aftermath of this week's storm should inspire a hit movie: No City for Old Women.
My mother doesn't own a car, doesn't drive, hasn't been behind a wheel since manual gearshift was on the steering column.
But when it snows as heavily as it did this week, my mother doesn't walk - at least not beyond the front door of her apartment in Côte des Neiges. As of yesterday, the sidewalk had not been cleared sufficiently to allow a nonagenarian safe passage with her walker.
Being a good son, I thought I would drop off milk, some fresh fruit, a few other essentials.
An admirable impulse, but manifestations of filial devotion will have to wait until the snowblower has cleared my mother's street.
I love her dearly. But there's nowhere to park.
There's nowhere to park for a prima donna like me, who commutes from a contractor-cleared driveway and a municipally plowed street in Pointe Claire. And there are precious few places to park for people who live in Montreal and rely on street parking.
Residents whose cars usually line both sides of the street have carved out spaces with huge mounds of snow between. This reduces total parking volume by at least one-third, maybe half,
depending on how enthusiastic and/or skilful people are about carving out niches in the winter wonderland.
It is an article of faith, in the environmentally friendly salons of the Plateau Mont Royal and other pockets of bourgeois bohemia, that car ownership is incompatible with urban life. For maybe nine months of the year, you can nod polite agreement before driving home. But winter - or, this year, late autumn - reinforces the anti-automobile lobby.
The city may become car-free once the argument sinks in and the oil runs out. But until then, urban motorists will literally have to carve out an accommodation with the elements.
"We're fine as long as we can park our car at a 45-degree angle, jammed into a snowbank," a friend who lives in Ahuntsic said.
"Then you drive down Laurier, where the Outremont side is perfectly clear and the Montreal side is a mess.
"The mounds are so high that I suspect they've taken the Outremont snow and dumped it on the Montreal side."
Ian Tkach, a film production manager who lives in Kirkland, drove downtown to the Gazette blood donor clinic yesterday. He said he had to circle the Dominion Square Building 20 times to find a parking spot.
"Then you go on side streets and 20 parking spots are reduced to five," Tkach added. "I think twits run the city. It's like what we had this week was the first snowfall in history."
That's a bit harsh. Montreal has its snow-removal priorities right. The big dump occurred on Monday, and crews went to work clearing major thoroughfares.
By Tuesday, patients could get to hospitals and students could get to schools.
Pensioners who wanted to get to shopping centres, however, would have to wait ... and wait ... and wait.
"No matter how many millions the city spends or how many thousands of workers are out clearing snow, it can't be done in one day," former city councillor Jeremy Searle said.
He says Montreal does a more efficient job of snow clearing than a municipality like Westmount.
"It sounds counter-intuitive," Searle said. "But small municipalities like Westmount are able to do snow clearing on both sides of the street at the same time because cars are parked off the street. In Montreal, cars are parked everywhere. So, in effect, they have to do the whole road system twice."
A more sensible approach, Searle suggests, would be having both sides cleared on alternate streets.
He concedes, however, "citizens would whine too much because they want to be able to park right in front of their own damn houses, even though there's nowhere to park because snow removal is held up because of people parked there."
Searle describes Montreal public works crews as "basically a military organization that does well with big equipment and military planning, like deploying a fleet of snow-clearing vehicles."
"It's just more fun when you've got millions of dollars and endless trucks. Toys for boys - and girls."
And there are good news stories. The city has plowed the new bicycle lane on de Maisonneuve Blvd.
I've offered my mother the use of my bike.
No comments:
Post a Comment