The City of Montreal has decided to make new streets in the Ville-Marie neighborhood one-way to make them safer for pedestrians.
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These are rue Fullum, rue Parthenais and rue de Rouen, which are in the area where a seven-year-old girl was fatally hit by a car last December.
These changes will be implemented at the end of the school year in July. This gives the city time to review the bus routes in this area, among other things.
“These are really historic measures and this is just the beginning for the district because we have already worked on measures, but we want to be able to better secure the entire Centre-Sud,” supported Mayor Valérie Plante during a press conference on Friday.
Passing through one-way streets avoids using neighborhoods as shortcuts to avoid traffic, Judge Plante.
However, the father of a five-year-old child expressed his displeasure at the announcement of the measures. “Enough of the little gestures, Mrs. Plante. We have to give the small streets back to the community,” he explained, interrupting the mayor.
According to the mayor, the reasons for the increase in collisions are obvious. “There are too many cars, they’re too big and they go too fast,” she said.
The Plante administration has therefore made no secret of placing safety above the flow of traffic.
“I don’t want to make motorists’ lives more difficult, I want to protect lives and then prevent collisions,” said Ms. Plante.
The mayor acknowledged that installing sidewalk protrusions or even speed bumps downtown is not easy.
Heavy traffic from the Jacques Cartier Bridge, for example, makes these changes difficult.
For his part, Chris McCray, member of the Collective Appeasement for Sainte-Marie, reacted: “The centre-south is under increasing pressure, especially with the works on the bridge tunnel, these changes were necessary”.