Joel Goldenberg – The Suburban LJI Reporter

The Transit website (transitapp.com), which advocates for less use of cars, has ranked the Town of Mount Royal and Hampstead as the best Greater Montreal area locales in terms of clearing snow from bus stops in their respective areas.

Mayor Jeremy Levi of Hampstead posted an image of the article with the results on his Facebook page.

The website’s blog says that “as bus riders, we don’t need to unearth our automobiles with ice picks and backhoes every time the snow falls. But when a stop is snowed under, it turns a perfectly normal waiting area into a boot-freezing, foot-soggening, day-ruining expedition, especially for those who can’t climb a mountain of snow just to get to their bus.”

The site asked bus riders to rank how different cities and towns cleaned the area around bus stops following the Dec. 4 storm that resulted in 36 centimetres of snow. In a five-day period, transit users rated 6,500 bus stops in the great Montreal area, including Laval and the South Shore, and one in four STM stops in Montreal proper.

“Of Montreal’s 19 city boroughs and 15 suburban municipalities, it was two of the wealthiest suburban towns — Mount Royal and Hampstead — that took home the top prizes, followed closely by the Montreal borough of Ahuntsic-Cartierville. Over the course of the week, the average rating across the entire island was 3.41 out of 5. That means riders said their stops were usually on the ‘more side of ‘more or less clear.’ The only place to fall on the ‘less’ side of the equation: last-place was Montreal East, a heavily industrial area in the island’s east end.” Also near the bottom of the rankings was Ville-Marie, which includes downtown. Off-island, suburban bus stops in Laval and on the South Shore also underperformed. Though it’s not all doom and gloom in the ‘burbs: exo bus stops in farther-flung exurbs did almost as well as the average in Montreal itself.”

For the west end and West Island, the survey also ranked Dorval 9th for snow removal at bus stops, Dollard des Ormeaux 10th, Ste. Anne de Bellevue 11th, CDN-NDG 12th, Côte St. Luc 14th, Pierrefonds-Roxboro 15th, Île Bizard-Ste, Geneviève 16th, Beaconsfield 18th, Kirkland 20th, Baie d’Urfé 22nd, Outremont 24th, Westmount 25th, Pointe Claire 27th, Verdun 28th, Lachine 30th, LaSalle 33rd, St. Laurent 34th and Montreal West 35th. n