Wednesday 17 October 2007

Saturday Photo: Home Depot's Park-and-Ride?

You’re going to have to trust me on this one: I tried every angle I could think of and this is the best I could come up with.

What you’ve have here is 7:15 a.m. on a Thursday in the parking lot at the Home Depot on the border between the Mile End and the La Petite Italie districts in Montreal. There’s a railroad line off to the left, and at one time this was a light industrial area. Home Depot came in a few years ago and built a good sized store on land which once had an old factory on it. The thing is, though, the store designers must have used plans standard on stores on the edges of urban areas because they bought too much land and put in a parking lot much bigger than necessary. Even on Saturdays when the store is crowded the parking lot is never full, since in this densely populated area, lots of people don’t have cars. They’ll walk to the hardware store and take the near-by bus or hail a cab to get home with their purchases.

There are two areas of the lot that fill up early week day mornings though—the corner nearest the railroad and the one on the opposite side which is nearest the bus lines and some light industry which lingers in the neighborhood. People who work there park in the lot for free, while others who live further out use it as a park and ride, catching the 545 bus to downtown Montreal.

2 comments:

Martin Langeland said...

Pretty canny for citizens of a city in "civilized decline," as the NRO idiot has it. You may be amused by Roy's thoughts on the notion at Alicublog
--ml

p.s.: Roy was once a student of mine. My only claim is that, obviously, I didn't damage him too much.

Mary Soderstrom said...

Oh,civilized decline. Well, I'll take that over a whole of cities in the US who exhibit whatever the conservatives say is the opposite of decline.

More about Toronto and the Greeenscapes conference I was at tomorrow.

Mary