Westmount recently renewed a lease with CP Rail for a section of land adjacent to the tracks where the City has erected an experimental prototype sound barrier.
The 30-metre-long test section, made of concrete with a transparent plastic top, has been in place for several years at the foot of Abbott and Lewis avenues below Ste. Catherine Street.
At least $8 million more could eventually be spent on a permanent sound barrier about a mile long, which would extend from Atwater to Lansdowne avenues.
With impending major demolition and reconstruction work due to start soon on the expressway, Director General Duncan Campbell says “an excellent opportunity to extend the barrier to the whole width of Westmount” is presenting itself.
Campbell says the City wrote to Quebec in July, although a response has yet to be received. Last month, Quebec’s Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) released an impact report on the Turcot project after holding public consultations over the past year.
The BAPE told the provincial Ministry of Transport it should go back to the drawing board and take the concerns of local citizens more seriously. However, since the report’s release, according to Campbell, nothing has been heard from the MTQ on Westmount’s proposal for a full-length sound barrier.
“We’re hoping the government would move ahead with it — in other words they would pay for it,” he says. “Because normally a sound barrier would go in with 50 per cent of the cost borne by the municipality, 50 per cent by the MTQ. But in this case we have no indication that the government is interested in extending the sound barrier or paying for it.
“We would wait to see what opportunities there are to extend the sound barrier, and then we would decide whether the one we have or something similar to that is what we would wish. But we basically re-started the discussion that given the opportunity with the Turcot, wouldn’t it be a great time to re-think the whole issue of the sound barrier along our southern limit?”
Westmount awaits word from Quebec on full-length sound barrier
Westmount awaits word from Quebec on full-length sound barrier
-
Published on
December 15, 2009
- Published on February 12, 2010
-
Martin C.
City officials are eagerly waiting to hear whether Quebec will pick up the tab for a full-length sound barrier to run along the Ville Marie Expressway and CP Rail line.
- Rate
- Top of the page
Comments
-
- Mr. Friedman
- - February 17, 2010 at 14:18:05
This is the perfect example of abysmal urban planning. The section of the 720 and train track which runs parallel to lower Westmount should have been built as a tunnel rather than as an open stretch of road. These sound barriers are akin to putting a bandage on an infected wound; I have been to the dead end on Abbott where the sound barrier was erected and the difference in noise and vibrations is negligible, at best. When I lived in lower Westmount I could even hear it from the 7th floor of my high rise on Dorchester with my windows shut and it was absolutely appalling! They've known for years that the sound and air pollution emanating from this highway is at an illegal level and recent studies have proven that this leads to high blood pressure, shorter life spans, asthma and cancer. If I was a permanent resident, I would file a class action lawsuit because this is criminal. I almost fell of my chair when I read the following study: Hoek, Brunekreef, Goldbohn, Fischer, van den Brandt. (2002). Association between mortality and indicators of traffic-related air pollution in the Netherlands: a cohort study. Lancet, 360 (9341): 1203-9. ''They found that people who lived near a main road were almost twice as likely to die from heart or lung disease and 1.4 times as likely to die from any cause compared with those who lived in less-trafficked areas.''
