Montreal has once again made the news, and not for the best of reasons.
The city is spending some $24 million dollars to attract the Formula E electric car race to the city.
The race will be run on city streets including the wide Rene Levesque boulevard, a major thoroughfare.
The streets however are not up to race car standards so repaving was being carried out. Lots of the now iconic orange construction cones were set out to direct traffic as construction was being carried out.
Then came the construction workers strike last week and over the weekend. With the strike looming, a paving blitz was ordered to get as much done as quickly as possible. As is often the case, the traffic cones were a bit confusing, and it seems at some point a car slipped through and was parked, and somehow, nobody noticed until the paving crew arrived at that spot. It would seem that, rather than slow down and wait for a tow truck, they chose to simply pave around it.
This of course has since made for much amusement as images were shared on social media.
François Limoges, a city councillor was unhappy about the situation saying it again shows Montreal in a bad light.
He also claims it’s a reflection of the whole current city administration under Mayor Denis Coderre.
Qouted in the CBC he says , “it’s i “It’s improvised, it’s botched and it’s mismanaged”.
The official response to the situation is that the paving was just a base layer only and would not compromise the quality of the finished road.
Limoges speaking more directly about the paving situation said “The roads are broken. Everything is old. We need quality work, not one-centimetre pavement for a race that no one cares about. This won’t hold more than a few months if not a few weeks”.
The Formula E race is scheduled for the end of July.
The incident is somewhat reminiscent of a road redesign in Quebec’s Eastern Townships in 2012. The road was redesigned around a telephone pole. The pole remained in the middle of the road for weeks up until the story made national news, after which the pole was relocated.
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