"Watch out! It's coming right for you!" Montreal, where I live, was hit by some pretty harsh weather last week. Well, not harsh by Montreal standards but still pretty ridiculous. As is usually the case, snow storms lead to icy conditions on the sidewalks. Normally, the city will send out its army of high school dropouts making $60 000 a year to salt the ice. However, Montreal has elected to put abrasive gravel down in some neighbourhoods. Problem is, gravel sucks; it doesn't work. As I walked home from work today, it came as no surprise to me that Westmount, a white upper class borough, was a breeze to navigate while Notre Dame de Grace (NDG=No Damn Good), a racially diverse and working class neighbourhood with a reputation for crime, was a wintery urban hellscape.
Just sayin'
1 comment:
Yeah, we've got gravel here on Not Quite The Plateau, too. If you had a car, you'd also get to enjoy the road-clearing system, whereby everybody with street parking ends up under a giant goddamn snowbank (with the consistency of concrete thanks to the overuse of rock salt), and then they put up signs at some random point between 2 and 7 days later giving you half a day's notice to dig yourself out and park across the street or you'll get towed. Montreal municipal services rule.
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