The buried Otter Lake occupied a good deal of the present-day Turcot Yards (courtesy of Walking Turcot Yards)  The Ministry of Transport has hit a major snag in its plans to replace the crumbling Turcot Interchange. Last week, le Soleil reported that “high level” negotiations between the Ministry of Transport and CN would be required, with ex-premier Daniel Johnson at the helm. The sticky issues include a CN bridge used by motorists in Quebec City, and the MTQ’s plans for the rail company's right-of-way ...

Source: Bing Maps NDG residents fed up with confusing, scary intersections take note: Tomorrow, your local cycling group will be meeting at Décarie and de Maisonneuve Blvds on Saturday November 19, at 3pm for a demonstration and press event to urge the City to build a safe connection for the de Maisonneuve bicycle path across Décarie Boulevard. In their press release the NDG Cyclist and Pedestrian Association writes: Now that the intersection at de Maisonneuve and Décarie Blvd is going to be completely transformed due to ...

It's amazing what a few hours poking around the Ministry of Transport's website can reveal. What does this province spend on new highway construction and maintenance, I wondered? What are the trends? How does this compare with provincial spending on public transit? I knew what I would find wouldn't be pretty, but I had no idea. Over the past seven years, a fairly consistent relationship of 10:1 spending of highways to transit has been maintained. But ...

Images all Flickr Creative Commons, courtesy of MPD01605, lestudio1, mechanikat & theseoduke With allegations of corruption and collusion in the highway construction industry emerging with impressive (and depressing) regularity, Montrealers could be forgiven for responding to the damning report of the Jacques Duchesneau anti-corruption squad with a shrug. Corruption? What else is new? Yet in this report we find more details (though no names) about the kind of crooked and costly dealings we have been hearing about since the Charest Liberals began frantically dumping billions into repairing (and expanding) the province’s neglected  highway infrastructure.  (An eye-watering $4B will be spent in this and subsequent years, representing 5.8% of total 2011-12 government program spending.) The primary contribution of the Duchesneau report is simple yet horrifying to comprehend: at a time of incredible public expenditure on highway infrastructure, there is no effective government oversight leading and controlling this process. In the words of the report’s authors, we are no longer talking about marginal or parallel criminal activities, but rather a takeover of provincial and municipal responsibilities by organized crime. This, of course, to maximize their profits at the public’s expense. The details of the corruption and collusion identified are interesting to read and follow the same pattern as much of what has already come to light: price-fixing between colluding construction companies (including intimidation when rogue companies actually play by the rules); major engineering firms drafting plans and policy in the absence of the adequate expertise at the Ministry of Transport, then winning the contracts overseeing the work; and of course the political contributions, not just to the embattled premier's Liberal party, but to the PQ and much-reduced ADQ.

Welcome to Portland boul. Notre-Dame In the face of harsh critiques from just about every imaginable governmental and non-governmental body in the province for its previous plan for the Turcot interchange, the Ministère du Tranports (MTQ) went back to the drawing board over the summer, promising to return with an improved plan for the monumental structure. Finally, the results have been made public. So has the MTQ responded to calls for a truly multimodal transport strategy that will improve quality of life for future generations of Montrealers? Judging by their flashy updated website, interactive map, computer renderings depicting urban scenes like the one above and new moniker guaranteed to make holdouts feel warm and cuddly inside ("Turcot - Un projet aux couleurs de Montréal"), the folks at the MTQ have been busy.  After a dizzying tour of their website, one almost forgets that behind images of a sexy new (potential) tramway, a futuristic marketplace and billions in future economic spin-offs, this is actually a highway project. So what changes are actually being proposed to this vehicle-moving machine? I have attempted to cut through the noise in order to highlight a few new details; you can decide for yourself what is substantive and just another layer of "green" frosting.