During a meet-the-councillors evening held on Wednesday by the NDG Community Council at Wesley United Church, McQueen, the sole member of the Projet Montréal opposition on the borough council, responded to a woman who has been trying unsuccessfully to have an additional crosswalk put in on Somerled Avenue near Royal Vale School.

McQueen suggested that the borough council should consider taking drastic action with some of its employees who deal with traffic management in a way that clearly favours the flow of cars over the safety of pedestrians. Applebaum reacted strongly against the idea.

“This issue of traffic calming in NDG, in my district, is one issue where unfortunately I cannot report that there has been any progress,” said McQueen, adding that he was “not optimistic” there would soon be any improvement under the current administration.

“One of the problems I feel I’m facing is not just that I think my party attributes a greater importance to this, and that’s one ongoing discussion in negotiation. I also feel that the fonctionnaires, the borough civil servants who unfortunately are in charge of traffic, are reticent to change anything. Their idea, you know, of the signalisation on our streets is how quickly it moves cars.

“When they look at their numbers or their charts or their systems or their norms and other technical data which is at the very core of what they do, it’s all geared to volumes of traffic flow per hour for different kinds of roads. And I think that one of the problems in NDG, my part of NDG, eastern NDG, is that there’s a great demand politically from the residents.”

McQueen said, the borough’s bureaucrats “are behind and it’s going to take pushing, I mean to the point of possibly a change in who the fonctionnaires are.” He said that in the Borough of Plateau-Mont Royal, where Projet Montréal has all the borough council seats, “there has been some talk of actually letting go of some traffic planning fonctionnaires. I don’t know if they finally did, but that’s how far they had to go to get the changes they were looking for.”

While insisting he respected McQueen’s viewpoint, Applebaum criticized him and dismissed the notion that some residents might take matters into their hands by implementing their own traffic control measures. “It would be ridiculous for an individual to go paint a sign or go put up a stop sign themselves, or that a councillor proposes to remove the expertise that we have,” Applebaum said.

“It’s like saying we’re going to build a building, but we’re not going to have engineers and architects do it.” Although Applebaum promised to get an opinion from the traffic planning experts, he told the woman, “I’m not sure you’re going to be happy with the response … We’re not going to put (a new crosswalk) in just because citizens say ‘I want it.’ We’re going to make sure that it’s done properly and safely and secure and signed by an engineer who says that, yes, it respects the codes.”