Feeling unsafe, fed up with getting their cars smashed, Plateau residents demand changes to pedestrian zone

Four. That's how many times Raymond Pagé's adapted car has been struck by another vehicle on St-Hubert Street so far this summer — all since Mont-Royal Avenue in Montreal's Plateau-Mont-Royal borough has become a pedestrian-only zone.

"When we go out, we never know if we will still have a side mirror, if we will have a functioning door, if we will still have a bumper," said Pagé's wife, Louise Gareau. "This is our daily life."

With traffic diverted from Mont-Royal Avenue, they say trucks and large vehicles are circulating on their street, and now they're footing the bill, thousands of dollars in repairs. 

"We have the choice to either park the car in the street and risk having the car broken … or get ticketed," said Pagé, adding he is planning to contest the tickets. 

Fed up with dealing with the scrapes and collisions, the couple have resorted to partially parking on the sidewalk, a decision that has cost hundreds of dollars in parking tickets. 

Pagé and Gareau are not the only frustrated residents on St-Hubert. They, along with hundreds of other residents in the neighbourhood, are calling on the borough council to quickly implement measures to make St-Hubert between Mont-Royal Avenue and Saint-Joseph Boulevard safer from heavy traffic.

They say they aren't opposed to pedestrian-only streets — but they say the concept has to be improved so that spillover traffic doesn't make other streets unlivable.

Geneviève Savard has lived on St-Hubert for over 25 years. 

"It's a big security problem," she said. "There's a lot of accidents."

Savard says the pedestrianization of Mont-Royal means cars and large trucks have nowhere to go and end up taking smaller streets like St-Hubert, despite the signs — like the one at the intersection of Christophe-Colomb Avenue and Rachel Street — telling them not to.

She says she regularly sees drivers get stuck behind large vehicles and try to reverse out of gridlock, putting the people of the neighbourhood in danger. 

She says she and her fellow residents have sent letters, attended multiple council meetings and met with council members.

In March, before the pedestrian zone was opened, more than 250 signed a petition asking the borough council to add more signs warning trucks not to drive through their street. Petitioners also proposed blocking vehicle access for non-residents and turning the street into a one-way in the opposite direction.

"We have proposed a lot of measures, but they are unapplied. So now it's an emergency, so we're asking to block the little streets on Mont-Royal like it was before the pandemic, when there was a sidewalk sale," said Savard. 

Marie Plourde, councillor for the borough and deputy mayor of Montreal, told CBC the borough is looking for solutions to resolve the traffic and safety issues.

Plourde said the borough commissioned a study on possible improvements and is now waiting for the results. In the meantime, she said the borough has installed bollards as well as signage, and it has asked the local police precinct to increase its surveillance of the area.

"Everything is on the table right now," she said, adding the borough is also considering installing speed bumps, reversing the direction of traffic and removing parking on one side of the street.

However, blocking access to commuters at Mont-Royal and St-Hubert — as some residents have asked — would mean removing parking on both sides of the street, impeding the ability of emergency responders to access the area, said Plourde.