Life in the Bike Lane - The mayor of Montreal’s Plateau borough races to keep commuters’ cars out of his borough

That’s my mayor!

irishboyinlondon:

Nice article about a local Canadian mayor trying to make his neighbourhood a nice place to be as opposed to a rat run for commuters…

LUC FERRANDEZ’S last bicycle was a Kona, a sturdy model with thick tires, ideal for hauling heavy loads. During his 2009 campaign as the Projet Montréal candidate for the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, he would hook it to a trailer piled with a laptop, a projector, a collapsible screen, and (this being Montreal) a couple of bottles of rosé. After setting up his equipment next to a café terrace or a depanneur, he would distribute paper cups and launch a PowerPoint slide show of streets and squares in Copenhagen, Paris, and Madrid, as well as historical photos of local boulevards, all unencumbered by traffic. He figures it was these partys de trottoir, or sidewalk parties — during which he made the case that Montreal could be as clean, green, and safe as any place in Europe — that won him the mayoralty of the city’s most populous district. 

1. physical-dreamscape reblogged this from irishboyinlondon and added:

   That’s my mayor!

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4. morethis reblogged this from irishboyinlondon and added:

   This man has caused quite the stink with his ‘war on the car’. People aggressively yell at him in meetings. Montreal is...

5. irishboyinlondon posted this