Another idiotic way that these bicycle obsessed idiots are ruining cities and driving most of the paying traffic out of downtowns.
Expecting people to exclusively ride bicycles in places where the weather is not conducive during most of the year is asinine.
This is often the type of remark I hear from people living outside of Montreal or in its suburbs like P.A.T.-RDP or West Island.
We're talking about parking in the streets, right? Downtown has plenty of private indoor parkings that give you direct access to the malls and the Montreal underground. And you obviously also can go outside as well.
As someone who lives in Montreal and works downtown, the one thing I really hate is how narrow the sidewalks are. There's barely any room to move, especially in the winter. Unfortunately, the streets are very narrow, so to expand the sidewalk, we need to eliminate parking spaces.
However, in other neighborhoods, like the Plateau or Hochelaga, or other smaller residential places, there needs to be accomodations for cars if we're to eliminate street parking. This is one thing I find that this administration doesn't think through.
In the lack of comprehensive public transportation options for everyone not in the immediate city limits.
Dont get me wrong, Im for the change because I recognize that a change like this is going to suck for the little while it takes things to shift more widely. But I'm also aware that the topic doesn't have a "one-solution-for-all" answer.
To be fair, everyone "not in the city limits" have complained about public transportation options since forever. Preferring using their cars over anything else.
I don't think Montréal sucks that much public transit wise. And if you live south shore, it can be accessed by transit very well. In contrast I find people that drive downtown or wherever to work from south shore unnecessarily rather stupid.
That said, Montreal does lack good surface level transit on separated tracks. What Montreal has in the form of "missing middle" lacking in other North American cities, it's lacking the street car tracks to move all those in the middle around.
The King, Queen and Spadina streetcars are excellent people movers, and it's a joy to hop on and off of them to hit up multiple places enroute. The same can be said of the 2, 4/6 and 47/49 tram lines in Budapest. Or the metro line 1, which is basically subsurface like the London underground. Or all 12 tram lines in Brno. Or all the lines that hit the Jelačić square in Zagreb.
Imagine if Parc, Mont-Royal (even during the summer) and main still had street cars running, how much easier it would be to get around without the hassle of being stuck in traffic or having to go up and down for five minutes each into metro stations.