The road to a better Mount Royal starts with safety

Mount Royal has hardly been ignored by city planners over the decades, yet somehow the road network on and around the mecca for outdoor activities remains hopelessly stuck in the 1950s.

The mountain is surrounded by highway-type roads with wide lanes that incite drivers to speed or make dangerous manoeuvres, and after two high-profile deaths in 2016 and 2017, advocates hoped the city would finally be spurred into action.

Yet despite promises by the administration of Mayor Valérie Plante, the road network on and around Mount Royal remains mostly unchanged since it was built in the 1950s.

Safety advocates say there is an urgency to act. Thousands of joggers and cyclists make use of the mountain, and more than 10,000 cars roll daily along Camillien-Houde Way and Remembrance Rd. — the lone through road whose name changes around the midpoint, at the entrance of Mount Royal Cemetery.

Around 80 per cent of those motorists use the mountain road as a shortcut to another destination. As early as the 1980s, then-mayor Jean Doré aspired to eliminate through traffic and envisioned a tree-lined park route that would be safer for cyclists and pedestrians.

However, there seemed to be little appetite for change until the summer of 2018. That’s when a pilot project by the Plante administration to bar transiting cars appeared to be a success, despite initial public opposition. A report the following year from the city’s public consultation office concluded Montrealers want to limit cars on the park road, as long as it is done after citizens are able to give their feedback.

So why has the roadway remained mostly unchanged since tramway rails were pulled out in 1958? Safety advocates and lobby groups representing the mountain say the Plante administration seems gun shy after the last attempt.

“It’s a lack of leadership on the part of the City of Montreal,” said Marc-Antoine Desjardins, an elite cyclist who organized the Cyclovia events on the mountain that saw Camillien-Houde closed to motor vehicles over multiple Sunday mornings over the last few summers.

Desjardins, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2021, would like to see the mountain closed more often to cars, but the city seems reluctant to do so.

He explained that the road across Mount Royal is one of the only spots on the island where elite and competitive cyclists can practise climbs. But it remains dangerous because, while plastic posts during the spring and summer add a form of protection on the shoulders of the roadway, they restrict cyclists to a narrow space and make it difficult to pass others.

Also, with the shoulder pavement in a terrible state, many cyclists opt to ride in the middle of the road, where there can be conflicts with cars.

While the city has placed concrete barriers in the median to bar U-turns on part of the road, they don’t cover the entirety of the roadway, so motorists can still make the dangerous manoeuvre that resulted in the death of 18-year-old cyclist Clément Ouimet in 2017.

A white “ghost bike” marks the spot on Camillien-Houde where Ouimet died. He was riding downhill and crashed into a car driven by a tourist that was stopped while attempting a U-turn.

“If you’re going downhill through a blind corner, you’re always at risk,” Desjardins said. “The corner we call now Clément corner, I squeeze my brakes and slow down, but not everyone does.”

Séverine Le Page, a spokesperson for Vélo Fantôme Montréal, agrees the area where Ouimet died is perhaps even more dangerous now.

Desjardins said there is no secret to improving cyclist safety: Vastly increase the number of days and hours when cars are banned, so that cars are permitted only during certain hours of the day, or only on certain days.

There has been much discussion on how to create safe spaces on the mountain, dating back to the 1950s when the through road took its present form. At the time, the administration of mayor Jean Drapeau hoped it would be a “chemin de plaisance” — a scenic route — a term that was used in the 2019 public consultation report.

Other plans from that era envisioned two tunnels through the mountain — one linking Duluth St. with Côte-des-Neiges Rd., the other Atwater Ave. with Town of Mount Royal — with an underground roundabout where they would meet.

At the time, the city was experiencing a vast expansion of car ownership and the mountain was seen as an obstacle for cars to get downtown.

These days, city planners are examining how to reduce the speed and number of cars transiting across the mountain. They agree the vocation of the roads going around and across the mountain are not well adapted for pedestrian and cyclist safety.

“It’s a park, surrounded by highways,” Le Page said.

Referring to Camillien-Houde and the eight-lane Parc Ave. between Pine Ave. and Mont-Royal Ave., she said the city needs to redesign those roads with visual cues for motorists to slow down.

“If they could narrow the lanes, it would feel more like a park,” Le Page said. “The larger the lane, the quicker you think you can go, regardless of signage.”

As the number of people opting to ride bikes continues to increase, she said, there will be more and more people riding their bikes to the mountain, meaning more chances for conflicts between bikes and cars.

Her group has also denounced the lack of safe bike paths and walking trails leading to the mountain. Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd., for example, has had a protected bike path for more than a decade that ends four blocks away from the mountain, while no bike paths come close to the park’s southern Peel St. entrance or the Westmount or Côte-des-Neiges entry points.

Making matters worse, the city has ignored pleas from cycling groups to add a protected bike path to a $52-million project now underway to remake the entrance at Côte-des-Neiges Rd. at Remembrance Rd.

Only Parc Ave. has a bike path that comes close: It ends across the street from the Georges-Étienne-Cartier monument.

In that spot, a tourist ran a red light and failed to see Conceptión Cortacans, 62, when she ran out in front of a bus that was parked. Cortacans was on her daily jog when she was struck and died in 2016. A bouquet of flowers and a running shoe affixed to a lamppost mark the spot in her memory.

A coroner said the lanes on Parc Ave. are too wide, and encourage drivers to speed. Her only recommendation — that signage be improved in the area to warn motorists that it is a park — has not been heeded by the city. 

Frédéric Bataille, a spokesperson for Coalition mobilité active Montréal, said the city must examine how to better integrate pedestrians into any new plans for the mountain. He pointed out that the intersection where Camillien-Houde meets Mont-Royal Ave. is confusing and dangerous, with no sidewalks in the area.

It’s also unclear whether pedestrians are permitted to walk up Camillien-Houde. Its design makes it uninviting to do so. While his group isn’t calling for a sidewalk to be built all the way up the roadway, he says there should be a clearly marked area where people can walk.

“It’s like a desert for pedestrians there,” Bataille said. “There are so many cars; it’s just impossible and unpleasant. But pedestrians should be permitted there. It should become much more pleasant, because it’s a direct link to the lookout. We should remove some of the concrete and asphalt and let nature retake its place.”

The city has studied the situation for decades. Among the piles of documents are plans from the era of mayor Gérald Tremblay, nearly 20 years ago, to build a ring road linking the summits, including a pedestrian overpass over Camillien-Houde linking the Mount Royal and Outremont summits.

Other documents outline how to include the mountain as a daily transit route for pedestrians accessing downtown and the neighbourhoods of Mile End, Côte-des-Neiges and Outremont.

“But these brilliant documents have to be turned into brilliant projects that are at the level that one would expect for the jewel that is the mountain,” said Hélène Panaïoti, the executive director of the non-profit group Les amis de la montagne.

“The vision we all had is that you would be able to travel from downtown Montreal all the way to the (Université de Montréal) campus, through the cemeteries, on foot, and have a totally amazing experience that’s not just in the park” Panaïoti said. “That is very unique to Montreal, so it will be really interesting to see how that develops.

“Everyone’s on board: the cemeteries, the Université de Montréal, McGill, and including Westmount, with links to green spaces there. We all love the idea of this mountain being a beautiful, very walkable green space that contributes to our health and well-being without it being penalized by our presence.

“It’s a wonderful experience to be able to access one part of the city from another by walking through the mountain, and something we cannot lose.”

Speaking to the Montreal Gazette this month, Sophie Mauzerolle, the executive committee member responsible for transportation and mobility, said the city will make its plans known “soon.”

“We are working with our teams to reconfigure all of Mount Royal, which will respect the recommendations of the city’s public consultation office,” she said.

Advocates say the city can’t afford to wait any longer.

jmagder@postmedia.com

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