I love Montreal, and I think the city has one of the best transit networks in North America. The beautiful stations and trains of the metro are only matched by its ability to whisk you from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.
But I’m sad — it’s been over a decade since the Montreal Metro grew at all, and while Vancouver and Toronto (and Ottawa, as well as Edmonton) are all expanding their rail systems, Montreal is not. Everything I love about Montreal depends on the existence of efficient public transit, and when that system does not grow, the city itself that I love so much can’t grow around it.
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The REM
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that Montreal — and Quebec — really only has one truly big public transit project, and that would be the REM: Montreal’s take on a system like the RER of Paris — mostly in terms of its regional scope. For less than $10 billion dollars, Montreal is getting 67 kilometres of new metro-style rail, with more modern fixings than any other system on this continent, and all in around a decade from announcement to people riding trains. It’s a project that will have an impact almost as enormous as the metro, but the project has not been welcomed.
The REM is a public-private partnership, although a variant that pushes the limits of “private”, since private profits in this case will fund the retirements of many Quebecers working in the public sector, whose pension fund CDPQ is funding and coordinating much of the project.
The discourse around the REM has always been frustrating and at times essentially anti-growth. There is far more discussion of what is being lost than what is being gained, like a rather rag-tag suburban rail line with service that would be considered bad in most of the world, or a rather unremarkable (in most major cities) tunnel that could be rather trivially duplicated if there was actually ever another serious project that needed it. And I fear there won’t be, because instead of talking about what more public transit would enable, the discourse all surrounds how bad it is that the public transit that Montreal is getting isn’t some imagined better project that was never built in the decades preceding. Instead of imagining big things and proposing better projects, it seems the editorial set in Montreal is mostly happy to complain about the one thing actually being built.
There was actually a second REM line proposed, one that would have given Montreal a rail transit system that could trade blows with Toronto or Chicago. But, the idea that part of the route might be built elevated was treated as an unthinkable atrocity — while central parts of Paris, Berlin and London seems to manage with trains that glide above the streets, this was unacceptable in Montreal. The project’s cancellation has left us with an apparently “acceptable” status quo where riders who might have benefited from the Eastern REM can hop on a slow unreliable bus, or more likely get in their car. The most intellectually insulting transit meeting I think I have ever been in was one talking about how the replacement for the Eastern REM would cost $30+ billion dollars because it was unacceptable for it to not be buried everywhere, including next to industrial sites and oil refineries (I am not kidding). But hey, at least a giant highway running through the centre of the metropolis has been saved! As that great quote goes, “a fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
The Blue Line Extension
Fortunately, there is actually another project — the blue line of the metro, which if it’s actually completed will be among the most expensive metro projects ever constructed. And this is a project that travels through the northeast of Montreal, not under the high rises of Hong Kong or the historic buildings of Paris.
The Blue line has been promised and never delivered more times than most would like to count, and while it seems like it might really get built this time, the project is being crippled with bad ideas. While Paris has not automated two of its oldest metro lines dating a century old (Lyon is also gradually automating it’s metro system), the STM sees no need to do the same on the Blue line as they undertake an expensive refit of its signalling system and infrastructure. While so much of what makes the Montreal Metro great is that it was built standing on the shoulders of the earlier Paris system, the Montreal of today seems to have no interest in what the great cities of the world are doing.
So Montreal is maybe getting an extension of the Blue line, albeit one that is worse in most ways than what you might see in a truly world class transit city. And the price? It’s not just expensive, it’s stratospheric. The 5 new stations of the Blue line will cost almost as much as the entire REM, a project that had to build tens of kilometres of viaduct, new underground stations on the airport branch, and one of the deepest metro stations in North America at Edouard-Montpetit on its own. The crippling prices paid for this project get little attention, even as “pro-transit” commentators talk about the latest controversy with the only serious transit project Quebec is building — the REM — which has included the literal wires used to power trains. In Paris, the 200-kilometre new suburban metro network being mostly built underground costs around a quarter as much as the blue line.
Trams on the Brain
Since Montreal can’t build, those who want transit have mostly decided they need to lower their expectations: In this case, idolizing the tram systems that have been built across France, including in cities of just a few hundred thousand people.
But, the same crowd who decries the REM — a project actually being built, and at a fraction of the cost of any other — has not seriously analyzed the tram projects of France. Such projects are only possible because the effective state apparatus that lets Paris build metro for a fraction of the price of Montreal also lets France put a tram in small provincial cities at less than the cost of the Pie-IX BRT.
The impact of these systems is also not understood, in Paris, which has built 12 different tram lines since the 90s (12 more than the entire province of Quebec I’ll note) only manages to move a tiny fraction (3%) of public transport passengers on them.
So in Montreal, most discourse around rail transit is focused around solutions which are likely to only move a tiny portion of the population. Now of course some trams would be nice! But there is far too little attention paid to local intellectuals like Marco Chitti who actually talk about how Montreal could learn from Europe to build effective trams, much like it once did with the metro.
Of course, when trams come into the picture, Quebec City has to come up. I was once excited that the city had aspirations to emulate the cost effectiveness and smart design of systems in Europe to actually show that Quebec was serious about investing in public transit. But, the usual things happened — only a single bidder showed up with trams on offer (something that may well be illegal in the EU), the city ok’d spending more on everything than comparable cities elsewhere would, the costs ballooned and the project was put on ice. It’s at this point that the onus should be placed on government — the one actor who seems at least slightly aware that paying billions on billions for tram lines is not tenable. Unfortunately, the government doesn’t seem to be doing much — mulling projects over, putting them into holding patterns, but not seriously questioning why nothing can be built. That uncertainty and the delays to projects only jacking up the prices further.
I can only ask; if the various politicians and “anti-REM pro-tram” academics actually want public transit, how can they also be okay with unfundable projects that won’t be done in time for their children’s children to ride? What’s the real atrocity, transit that people on the street can see above them (like in Vancouver, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Tokyo and more) or just… no transit? I’ve always considered moving to Montreal, but I am not sure I would fit in with the transit set, since I believe transit is great not in and of itself for aesthetic purposes, but because it enables mobility, social bonds, and connections.
Ontario
Fortunately, Quebec doesn’t need to look far to find a jurisdiction that is doing much better.
While Ontario does also struggle with a serious cost issue with its transit projects, to run you have to walk first. And while Quebec sits around talking about transit, Ontario is building the biggest transit expansion in the western world.
Since 2015, the province has opened a new tram system in Waterloo, as well as a subway extension, and airport train in Toronto (as well as the Ottawa Metro system, which has been a debacle — but a debacle that actually exists!). Improvements to the suburban trains around Toronto mean many residents can simply show up to a station any time of day and soon enough be on a train headed across the region at high speeds. Right now, three new tram lines are moving forward, as well as entirely new subway lines, three extensions, new trains for the network, new streetcar lines, and a transformation of the GO rail system into something like the Paris RER. The scope of these projects is enormous, and while the government of Ontario is putting up a lot of the money (10s of billions), so is the federal government. Quebec could also get some of that federal money if it could just decide to actually build something.
My hope has always been that Quebec would have to get very serious about building transit with Ontario doing so much next door, but that’s not happened. It seems that the unfortunate blindness to what is going wrong locally extends to a lack of awareness about what the neighbours are doing. While articles fly back and forth about where the first “tram that costs as much as a subway in a city serious about transit” gets built, nobody is pulling the alarm and singing from the rooftops about the crisis that is going on.
The Future
Now, I know this article has been candid about the problems facing Quebec, and that’s for good reason. The collectivist society that exists in the province and makes it such a great place is impossible to maintain without mass collective transport. Quebec can’t build and should accept this; and then fix it.
The causes of the construction cost crisis and the inability to plan for the future are obvious — the former issue has been studied in depth, while the latter is the result of no serious plan that actually gets executed. The original Montreal Metro worked and had a long term plan — the same should be true of the big future transit build Quebec needs.
In France, trams can be built at low cost because they are mostly standardized from city to city. The same agencies that can build a tram in Paris, can (and do) go build a tram in Lyon, or Toulouse (or overseas) — the engineers and planners are employed by the state with a good wage and know how to create a project, and layers upon layers of consultants are not needed. Once the capable public sector has drawn up detailed plans for what it needs, projects can be handed off to a functioning private sector where many players compete for the privilege to build projects: It’s not a case of having one bidder and handing the project to them.
If Quebec wants to get serious about public transit, it not only needs to figure out how to build, but it actually needs to build. If trams for Gatineau, Quebec City, and Montreal are something we want, plans should be drawn up to build them to the same standards, with the same vehicles and standardized requirements that allow for low-cost projects. There should be a pipeline into the future, so builders who jump into the market know that there is more money to be made in the future, and the planners and engineers of the province know that learning how transit is built is a smart career move for the future and won’t have to pack their bags for Ontario if they want to actually see something built.
Look at Hydro Quebec, a world leader in hydro power, transmission infrastructure, and the related fields of engineering — I’m not from Quebec, but I have pride knowing such a world class organization is Canadian! Quebec needs a Hydro Quebec but for transit, an organization that is lean but staffed up with engineers and planners who can take great ideas from around the world (and the rest of the country) and implement them in Quebec.
Now, maybe you take issue with the name of the article, but I think it’s perfect. Well yes Quebec is building one single large infrastructure project, the attitudes of both politicians and academics make it clear that this will be a one-time thing that’s not allowed to be repeated. When that one time thing is a cost-effective and timely project, you know things are headed in a disastrous direction.
I’ll likely write a further post about a transit and policy plan that could set Quebec on the right path — but until then, I hope you felt my frustration in this piece. Quebec is a great place, but that’s because brilliant people in the past made it so. If the province can’t build the infrastructure of the future, and if the academics and intellectuals of today can’t come up with more than rehashed metro extensions, and “trams like in Europe!”, the things that make the province great will slowly wash away.
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