Mayor Valerie Plante says the pilot project to forbid through traffic on Mount Royal will go ahead, even as the opposition at Montreal City Hall demands public consultations on the project.
The interim head of Ensemble Montreal, Lionel Perez, says an online petition on Change.org which has collected more than 9,000 signatures suggests the idea is not a popular one.
Another Change.org petition in support of the measure has so far garnered a little more than 500 signatures.
Perez also suggests the Plante administration announced the project without properly studying how the move would affect traffic on streets near the mountain.
In an open letter to La Presse published on Sunday, Plante suggested Montrealers want to make Mount Royal Park a safe place for nature lovers and sport buffs, without the intrusion of automobiles.
"The congestion and the thousands of vehicles that use this route every day take away people's interest in walking on the mountain, in addition to raising serious issues about getting along with the most vulnerable users," she wrote, referring to the death last October of a cyclist who was hit by a truck on the mountain back in October. "It's not acceptable for me that the lives of Montrealers are put in danger while they use out mountain for walking, playing sports or simply enjoying nature."
Plante also pointed out that on at least two occasions, transportation plans drawn up by previous municipal administrations had called for major changes on the way traffic on the mountain is administered.
Meanwhile, during a radio interview on Monday morning, Luc Ferrandez suggested he's surprised at the negative reaction to the project, suggesting he and his Projet Montreal colleagues have talked plenty about it during the election campaign.
"I thought it would be just a formality," he told Radio-Canada. "It was just so obvious the reasons why we were going to do it."