Persons homeless or strollers can sleep again and wander in the metro after a ban on doing so that lasted a month and a half and who did not solve the problem.
“The first days was day and night, but it gradually returned as before. There is still a lot of homelessness, ”says Richard Raad, the manager of a coffee inside the Berri-Uqam station.
“This is one of the worst years we have seen,” added the man who has been working in the metro for ten years.
He regularly sees itinerants who are looking for with customers and sleeping on the tables.
In mid-March, the Montreal Transport Company (STM) set up an “obligation to circulate”, a prohibition of strolling which ended on Wednesday.
Convicted benches
Nine stations have been redeveloped, such as Bonaventure station, on the Orange line.
The benches were sentenced to prevent people from expanding and a partition was also installed to block access to a vault where some were used to searches.
At Bonaventure station, the benches were sentenced to preventing itinerants from expanding. Photo Anek Lebel
This did not prevent a drug consumer from wandering near the counters, could see The newspaper At midday time Thursday.
“It has nothing to do with before. There were people who slept, urinated and defecated on the stairs, “said Jean-François Cardinal, who takes the metro every day to go to Bell.
“The weather is nice, it’s less worse, but it is sure that it will start again if we let them come back next winter,” he believes.
A roaming was installed outside, opposite Bonaventure station on Wednesday, when the STM ended the ban on strolling in the metro which lasted a month and a half. Photo Anek Lebel
He also underlines that the anti -long measures pushed the itinerants outside, around the station.
In distress
“Several people came to see us in a state of distress. If they were in the metro, it was because they could not go elsewhere, ”explains Andrew Marrocco, managing director of the St-Micheal mission, a 60-seat stopover in front of Bonaventure station.
He adds that others have “disappeared”.
“We don’t know where they are going. They have been rejected even further. It is even more difficult to join them and reintegrate them into society, ”he says.
The STM has declined our interview request.
“We will take the time to take stock based on the data that we are currently collecting and present our analysis in the coming weeks,” the spokesperson Laurence Houde-Roy said.
She did not specify whether the prohibition to stroll again would again be in force next winter.
