Narrow Laurier Park sidewalk provokes ire of Plateau-Mont-Royal residents

How many centimetres wide must a sidewalk be before you can call it a sidewalk?

Not rousing folk song material, but it's a philosophical question that has left some PlateauMont-Royal residents in a tizzy.

Crews doing roadwork onBrbeuf Street bordering Laurier Park havereduced the width of the sidewalkto make room for a bike path. The resulting strip of cement is now 70 cm across just barely wideenough for a baby strollerbut not wide enough for a wheelchair.

Residents have taken to social media to ridicule the new sidewalk, and Montreal'sopposition is using it to attack the Coderreadministration.

On Twitter, Luc Ferrandez, the borough mayor of the Plateau said, "It's unacceptable thatin 2015we eliminated half of a sidewalk that's used by thousands of people daily."

Ferrandez's tweets even got a snappy retort from the mayor himself. Ferrandez asked, "Is this to save on cement, or did you hide the rest of the sidewalks under the grass?"

To which the mayor replied, "Montreal, green city."

An unimportant sidewalk, mayor says

At a news conference on Friday, Coderre said the sidewalk is hardly usedand denounced the reaction of what he called theopposition's "radical militia".

"The sidewalk is so important that it wasn't even de-iced in winter," Coderre joked.

"There's a trail there. You can go to the other side of the streetMotorized vehicles can also use the bike path," he added.