The Caisse de Dépôt is going full steam ahead with its light-rail system and at the moment, the details are being worked out.
One of those details is where the stations will go.
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While we know where some will be built, the Kirkland station is still up in the air.
“For the Kirkland station, we still have two locations that we’re looking at,” said Caisse de Dépôt spokesperson, Jean-Vincent Lacroix. “There’s near Boulevard Saint-Charles and near Jean-Yves.”
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The Caisse explained that when they first met Kirkland town officials, they proposed a field of green space, between Berne Street and St-Charles, off Highway 40 West.
But officials in Kirkland thought of another idea.
They proposed building the station near the Cinéplex movie theatre with a parking lot behind Bénévoles Park.
“For these two locations, there’s still some work to do to see where the parking’s going to be, where the terminus for buses are going to be, and that’s why this is a continuous process,” Lacroix said.
The Mayor of Kirkland declined our request for an on-camera interview, stating that he didn’t want to confuse residents by commenting on the proposed sites. But residents say, they want to have a voice in choosing a location.
“If they could figure out a way to utilize other spaces that would be available without removing parks and stuff, that would be better,” a Kirkland resident told Global News.
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McGill urban planning professor, Richard Shearmur, said that though both sites take up some green space, he believes the Jean-Yves station makes more sense.
“It seems to be more logical, from a transport perspective, from the perspective of the fact that you have something there that will attract people,” he said. “They won’t just be getting on the light rail to go to work, they’ll be getting on the light rail to go to the Cineplex.”
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The Caisse said they and the town should decide on a site for the station in the next few months.
Meanwhile, they’ll only start construction once they receive the government’s share of the $5.5 billion price tag, and they hope that’ll happen by the end of the year.
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