Feed me! Feed me! the parking meter spoke, and the next thing I knew, I was flat broke!

Photo credit:OregonLive

Parking meters in downtown Portland don’t seem that expensive any more after hearing from my boss that parking meters in Montreal charge $3 per hour!!! ($1 U.S.=$1.2 CAD right now).

My boss Mr. Peterson, and his wife, just got back from a short trip to Montreal, Canada. He also told me there were so many food carts selling tons of delicious food, that you could gain weight just by looking at them but that’s another story.

So if I remember correctly the current parking meter fees in Portland are:

1-hour, 90-minute, and 3-hour meters: $1 per hour.

In the Lloyd District the meters are $.75 per hour.

5 hour meters: $.60 per 90 minutes.

In the Lloyd District these meters are $.35 per hour.

Can you imagine walking up to one of the Smart Meters and find out that parking is $3 per hour?

Photo above taken by N!fer. View N!fer’s photostream on flickr HERE. 

Photo credit:TravelAdventures.org

So I asked myself, what is it about Montreal that feels that it is justified to charge $3 per hour?

One thing I found out was THIS HERE. Which states that Montreal parking meters are used to raise funds for the homeless. Portland has it’s own “Real Change, not Spare Change” program by the way, in case you needed remindin’.

Or it may be that the City of Montreal has lots of employees who have kids, and kids need dancing lessons, as evidenced in the video below of a kid dancing in the streets of Montreal. It starts out slow, but toward the middle of the video, this kid starts dancing like a mad man boy!

 Check out the abdominal regions of every one of these Budweiser Girls, They’re exactly the same!!

In all seriousness though, the easiest explanation for the $3 Parking Meters: It’s Rich History.

Montreal, or Montréal in French, is the second-largest city in Canada and the largest city in the province of Quebec. Originally called Ville-Marie (‘City of Mary’), some historians think the city takes its present name from the Mont Réal (as it was pronounced in Middle French, or Mont Royal / Mount Royal in present French), the three-head hill at the heart of the city, whose name was also initially given to the island on which the city is located. 
 

 
                     

History

Archeological evidence suggests that various nomadic native peoples had occupied the island of Montreal for at least 2,000 years before the arrival of Europeans. With the development of the maize horticulture, the St. Lawrence Iroquoians established the village of Hochelaga at the foot of the Mount Royal. The French explorer Jacques Cartier visited Hochelaga on October 2, 1535, claiming the St. Lawrence Valley for France. Seventy years later, French explorer Samuel de Champlain reported that the St. Lawrence Iroquoians and their settlements had disappeared altogether from the St. Lawrence valley, likely due to inter-tribe wars, European diseases, and out-migration. Champlain established in 1611 a fur trading post on the Island of Montreal, on a site initially named La Place Royale, at the confluence of Saint-Pierre river and St-Lawrence river, where present-day Pointe-à-Callière stands.

 

 

 In 1639, Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière obtained the Seigneurial title to the Island of Montreal in the name of the Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal to establish a Roman Catholic mission for evangelizing natives. Ville-Marie, the first permanent French settlement on the Island, was founded in 1642 at Pointe-à-Callière. Complementing its missionary origins, Ville-Marie became a centre for the fur trade and a base for further French exploration in North America.

 

 

The bloody French and Iroquois Wars would threaten the survival of Ville-Marie until a peace treaty was signed at Montreal in 1701. Ville-Marie remained a French colony until 1760, when Pierre François de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnal surrendered it to the British army under Jeffrey Amherst during the French and Indian War.

The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended the Seven Years’ War and ceded eastern New France to the Kingdom of Great Britain. American Revolutionists under General Richard Montgomery briefly captured the city during the 1775 invasion of Canada.

                    

Montreal was incorporated as a city in 1832. The opening of the Lachine Canal permitted ships to bypass the unnavigable Lachine Rapids, while the construction of the Victoria Bridge established Montreal as a major railway hub. These linked the established Port of Montréal with continental markets and spawned rapid industrialization during the mid 1800s. By 1860, it was the largest city in British North America and the undisputed economic and cultural centre of Canada. Montreal was the capital of the Province of Canada from 1844 to 1849, but lost its status when a Tory mob burnt down the Parliament building to protest passage of the Rebellion Losses Bill.

 

After World War I, the Prohibition movement in the United States turned Montreal into a haven for Americans looking for alcohol. Montreal became known as Sin City, due to the abundance of alcohol and burlesque shows, unrivaled in North America at this time. Unemployment remained high in the city, and was exacerbated by the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Canada began to recover from the Great Depression in the mid-1930s, when skyscrapers such as the Sun Life Building began to appear.

 

 

After Montreal’s population surpassed one million in the early 1950s, Mayor Jean Drapeau laid down plans for the future development of the city. These plans included a new public-transit system and an underground city, the expansion of Montreal’s harbour, and the opening of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Tall, new buildings replaced old ones in this time period, including Montreal’s two tallest skyscrapers up to then: the 43-storey Place Ville-Marie and the 47-story Tour de la Bourse. Two new museums were also built, and in 1966, the Montreal Metro system opened, along with several new expressways. The city’s international status was cemented by Expo 67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Montreal experienced a slower rate of economic growth than many other major Canadian cities. By the late 1990s, however, Montreal’s economic climate had improved, as new firms and institutions began to fill the traditional business and financial niches. As the city celebrated its 350th anniversary in 1992, construction began on two new skyscrapers : 1000 de La Gauchetière and 1250 René-Lévesque. Montreal’s improving economic conditions allowed further enhancements of the city infrastructure, with the expansion of the metro system, construction of new skyscrapers and the development of new highways including the start of a ring road around the island.

 

In 2006, the city was recognized by the international design community as a UNESCO City of Design, one of the three world design capitals.
 

 

 One of the highlights as a tourist to Montreal is Old Montreal (or Vieux-Montréal in French) which is, the oldest area in the Canadian city of Montreal, dating back to New France. It is a major tourist draw; with the oldest of its buildings dating to the 1600s, being one of the oldest urban areas in North America. Located in the borough of Ville-Marie, the area is usually thought of as being bounded to the west by McGill St., to the north by Saint Antoine St., to the east by Berri St., and to the south by the Saint Lawrence River.

 

To see a higher resolution photo of the picture above, CLICK HERE.

 

Props to Wikipedia for Montreal information.

 

Peterson’s has 3 stores in direct proximity to public transportation, 2 on light rail, and 1 for the bus. So we are no stranger to being in the company of Bus/MAX riders who pop into one of our stores to kill some time by reading a magazine or to pick up a snack while waiting for their “Tardy” Bus or MAX. And by “Tardy” I’m not talking about short yellow buses either, although sometimes after a bus ride home it seems some of the obnoxious types should be takin’ the “short” bus. But I digress….

So we all know that relying on the printed “schedule” set forth by public transportation of all types is basically feeble at best. How many times have we arrived at the bus stop a minute or two early, only to find that it has come and gone just before we had gotten there.

Trimet has TransitTracker, which is mighty handy. 

But now a company called NextBus has a really cool thing going here. Utilizing G.P.S. technology, it can tell you when a certain bus, train or trolley will be arriving next. So far it has just a few of the major cities indexed, but I have a feeling that this thing will be a big hit.

From their website:

NextBus information is not a static schedule listing — it is actual arrival information, updated at regular intervals. Because traffic variations, breakdowns, and day-to-day problems faced by any transit provider can interrupt service, NextBus was designed to keep you on schedule even if your bus or train isn’t.

From the comfort and security of a protected place, you can learn when the next bus will arrive at your stop.

NextBus uses satellite technology and advanced computer modeling to track vehicles on their routes. Each vehicle is fitted with a satellite tracking system.

More information on how it works can be found by clicking HERE.

So far, as far as Oregon goes, they have it set up for the Portland Streetcar, which you can check out by clicking HERE.

Or if you want to check out the whole enchilada as far as other cities and states are concerned, you can click this link HERE.

Pretty nifty I say.

Or maybe I should say, Double Plus Good!

Well, we have just imported our WordPress blog to a Webhost. It will take us a little while to figure out all the parameters of this new situation, but when we do, it should be well worth it.

Speaking of inspirational, check out this video.