We were a dozen activists to participate in the extraordinary meeting of the City Council on December 15. We denounced the extreme slowness characterizing the accessibility of the Montreal metro. While the City’s Transport Plan provided for the accessibility of three stations per year, only four stations will be made accessible within five years!
We are very proud of this first mobilization and we are already thinking about it! Certainly, the challenge will be daunting. It is essential to deconstruct the discourse of the City and the STM. The STM VP said that our requests were IMPOSSIBLE to fulfill. He said that what we were asking for was accessibility in the short term when we were simply asking that the City respect its own transportation plan adopted in 2008! I invite you to read an article from CBC news dated September 14, 2009. It was on this date that the first elevators were inaugurated at Berri-UQÀM and Lionel-Groulx. The president of the STM, Michel Labrecque, then estimated that the metro would be completely accessible in about 25 years. A little more than a year later, the RAPLIQ claims that the pace of the accessibility of the metro should be in the image of the transportation plan and therefore the estimate of the president of the STM and will be charged with asking for ‘impossible!
