The Fédération internationale de l’automobile (FIA) – the international body that oversees motorsports – has presented the City of Montreal with the 2017 Smart Cities Award in recognition of the city’s initiatives in sustainable and intelligent transportation.
One of the city’s efforts to streamline and refine transport in Montreal is the Transport Electrification Strategy. The plan calls for converting the municipal fleet of combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles, implementing an economic development action plan to facilitate electrification, creating an institute on electrification and intelligent transportation, electrifying the public transportation network, creating a network of charging stations, and, ensuring ongoing collaboration with public and private partners in the electrification initiatives and in the promotion of sustainable mobility.
Starting this fall, The Urban Mobility Management Centre will be able to manage traffic in real-time using a network of specialized equipment — including 700 cameras. The center is equipped with servers, software and video screens, to allow real-time decisions that will help people make their way around the city more easily. Aref Salem, head of the executive committee responsible for transport, calls it “the heart and the brains” of the smart transport systems in Montreal.
Montreal has also adopted a Vision Zero road accident policy, pledging to improve intersections, street lights and cycling lanes, reduce city speed limits, and study limiting the size of delivery trucks. Vision Zero is an international movement started in Sweden in 1997 meant to reduce the number of fatal or serious accidents on a specific territory to zero.
“We are very proud of this recognition that the transportation revolution is definitely on the march in Montreal,” Montreal’s Mayor Denis Coderre said. “The city is putting everything in place to maximize the concrete benefits of its investments and efforts to electrify transportation. The changes we see here in favour of more sustainable, intelligent and service-oriented mobility will find echoes elsewhere in the world driven by Montreal’s assumed leadership.”