A-25 Redux

The mayor of the Anjou borough has a half-page on every "Ville d'Anjou" leaflet we get once every month.

On the whole A-25 issue, he has to say that it will improve the pollution situation by putting pressure off A-40, and that the complaint about lack of collective transports is silly since he asked Transport Québec to put reserved lanes for buses on the bridge, otherwise it was a no go.

He also mentions that the bridge won't really make urban sprawl worse, because people are already sprawled all the way to St-Jérome, and that's way farther than the sphere of influence of the new bridge. As he points out, people don't sprawl because a bridge becomes available--they sprawl because they can't find affordable and calm spaces in the city boudaries. Anjou could provide that, especially if it were less isolated from a transportation point of view. The A-25 bridge won't help that, particularly, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I'm worried that no bridge will also mean no metro, no commuter train and no A-720 extension.

Needless to say, I agree with much of what he says. I don't know about the pollution situation, though; A-13 was supposed to help, but didn't in the end, because it only allowed people to settle way further. A-25 won't be as bad since it won't reach all the way to the north shore, but it could still have unexpected effect. I think a longer A-720 would be a better choice if one wanted to make the "less pollution thanks to the highway" argument.

Still good points. Too bad he's preaching to the choir; he should write for the Plateau or Outremont regional newspaper. Still, I have some hope--the president of the chamber of commerce of eastern Montreal wrote an editorial in a major newspaper about the whole transportation infrastructure situation. Hopefully it's been heard.

Keeping my fingers crossed... At the very least, if that bridge has a cycling lane, I could cycle to Laval, and that would be, as they say, Way Cool.