Eccentric Flower:200908/L'Autoroute
From Eccentric Flower
«August 2009 «Eccentric Flower
L'Autoroute
Some notes for Nonelvis.
Pierre Le Moine, Sieur d'Iberville. And, while we're at it, his brother (not son; my mistake), Jean-Baptiste Le Moine, Sieur de Bienville.
The Quebec controlled-access highway system which is akin to our Interstates, and has signs very similar to them, is called the Autoroute system. That's the word I couldn't remember. Google Maps, referring to those highways as "QC 10" and so forth, was being nuts (as it so often is). They should have called them something like "A-10". "QC 10" would be Quebec Route 10 and it would have a green sign (like Quebec 133, the road which connects us to Vermont).
Apparently there is no consistent system of controlled-access highways across all Canada. Each province does its own thing, which in practice means that only Ontario and Quebec do.* In Ontario they are the 400-series highways, and are just called by their numbers e.g. "Highway 401." Although some of them have alternate names, the only one consistently referred to by its name is the Queen Elizabeth Way or QEW, which only the highway people know is Highway 451. In fact it has no publicly posted number; the signs just say QEW.
The STM on the side of the Montreal subway trains means Société de Transport de Montréal.
The "R É S" signs which mark the entrances to the underground corridor system are actually "RÉSO" - the down-arrow in a circle (AKA the subway symbol) is meant to be read as an O. "Réseau," get it? (It is not actually an acronym, as far as I can tell.)
The system has been so well-developed that there are now only a couple of subway stations downtown which have freestanding subway entrances without a building of some sort atop them. You may not have noticed, since the subway station we entered and exited the most happened to be one of those exceptions - Square-Victoria.
S--, who has family in Burlington VT and who has been up those roads to Montreal many times, confirms that the traffic we encountered was a perfect storm of rush hour, road detours (did you notice that it was utterly impossible to get to Île des Soeurs from either direction on the highway?), and the fact that there are weekend bus round-trip passes so Thursday nights are heavy bus periods into the city. And incidentally she independently mentioned the buses sweeping across the highway at that point, so apparently it's a well-established phenomenon.
The province is well aware that the Champlain Bridge is old and rickety and lacks capacity.
The lake I saw in Burlington was, in fact, Lake Champlain. I thought it was mostly within Canada but it turns out that most of it is within the US between Vermont and New York.
"Chantier" just means "construction site." ("Casque de chantier": hard hat. French. Gotta love it.)
* Nova Scotia apparently has some 100-series highways which do the same thing, which must be very short because Nova Scotia is only about 20,000 square miles, and the rest of Canada has the Trans-Canada Highway and dirt roads. Yes, I am one of those people who believes there is Quebec and Ontario and then a vast stretch of wasteland until Vancouver. I'm sure one day I will be beaten by armed thugs from Saskatoon.
