Montreal’s administration randomly decided to rename the central Avenue du Parc after Robert Bourassa, an uninteresting Liberal Premier of Quebec. This is annoying both because Parc is a good name that indicates whats there (uh… Montreal’s most popular park on both sides of the street) and because there’s already a metro station etc named after Henri Bourassa. Wanna confuse people about the city? Why not name two streets after people with the same last name, get tourists to familiarize themselves with the lineage before they can get around by themselves.
This kind of renaming just doesn’t make any sense to me, if anything we should be changing names to increase clarity, say by eliminating the two streets within 15 minutes of each other named Clarke (one is “Clark” while the other is “ClarkE”) or any of what must be hundreds of ambiguous names (road versus crescent with the same name anyone?), not to mention the infuriating X street WEST versus X street EAST (with the added fun of them being O and E in french). Renaming a street that already has an accurate name that actually describes what you’ll find there is completely counter-intuitive, especially considering the fact that Henri-Bourassa, who’se metro station is at the end of the Orange Line and is thus intrinsically associated with the whole line, is already branded into the minds of anyone riding public transit in the city.
At best it’s a poorly made decision about which The People should have been consulted, at worst it’s a stale political move in a city with more than enough stale politics to go around as it is.