It may have taken a long time to cut through the red tape of the city, but at last the two streets of Bernard and St. Viateur are now adorned with stop signs at every intersection between Av. du Parc and St. Urbain, putting vehicular traffic, at least to some degree, in its proper place: as secondary to pedestrian traffic. There may still be large SUVs idling while double parked from time to time, but at least they won’t be much able to reach speeds in excess of 40 km/h once they move on, since they’ll be forced to stop every 50 metres or so.
There was a fair bit of anticipation since ample signage had been posted well over a month before the changes were scheduled, not to mention the additional waiting period of about a week because the work was late. My head aches to think of the bureaucracy that necessitated the advance warning signs (ARRET IMPLANTE+DATE) in the first place. Why not just put up the darned stops with their fancy “nouvelle signalization” notice? Are bureaucrats so worried that people really aren’t very adaptable? The way I see it, we lost about six weeks of stop signs because of this inability to just “decide and do”.
Oh well. I know it’s not worth getting too worked up about, but for someone whose objective is to promote and see the full closure of a city street to vehicular traffic, I cringe at the kafka-esque absurdities that await Car Free Mile-End sans voitures in the halls of the municipal government.
As for the lateness of the work, I won’t complain. There’s probably some reasonable (ish) and mundane explanation, even though to my imagination it seems to represent the immense inertia of the status quo, trying desperately to hang on to “the way thing always were.” I comfort myself with the thought that there actually is a sea-change afoot: that the inertia is finally giving way.
I am glad that the stop signs are there; they represent to me the very beginning of change in the direction of a public, pedestrian urban space.
Maclean
0 comments:
Post a Comment
please share your comments and suggestions here, and remember that this, like the street itself, is a public sphere.