Downtown REM “could be buried”
Two engineering reports on the downtown REM state that it could be built as a tunnel but CDPQ Infra says tsk tsk, nope, not viable. That is to say, not sufficiently profitable.
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Kate
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mare 08:57 on 2021-09-04 Permalink
A tunnel —and underground station— would also potentially open up a future section of the REM by extending it to the West and connect it to the south of the West Island via the Vaudreuil-Hudson corridor. (If the REM was part of an actual transit plan and not a money making operation.)
ant6n 17:02 on 2021-09-04 Permalink
The whole idea of having a downtown terminus for a metro is silly to begin with. Metro lines, if they touch downtown, go through downtown, and connect to somewhere on both sides.
Kate 17:06 on 2021-09-04 Permalink
Because of where I was wandering around Saturday I went past the ongoing dig for the REM near UdeM, where a large poster brags that it’s the deepest transit tunnel in the world. That can’t have come cheap. And yet they can’t do the same downtown?
Daniel D 22:01 on 2021-09-04 Permalink
You’re right. I suspect:
(a) They’re saving an insane amount of money by having requisitioned an existing deep level tunnel instead of having to build a new one.
(b) As I recall, there were no original plans for connections at McGill and Eduard Montpetit, but they ended up being coerced into implementing them.
ant6n 04:19 on 2021-09-05 Permalink
It’s not the deepest metro station in the world, a 1s google search reveals deeper stations, e.g. Arsenalna in Kyiv with over 100m vs Edouard-Montpetit REM which is around 70.
There have been plans for stations at McGill and Edouard-Montpetit from the time the Metro was built. The Mont-Royal tunnel was planned as line 3, and at least Edouard-Montpetit was placed at the intersection with the tunnel. There were also studies to build commuter rail stations there, when the tunnel was still commuter rail (2007), the study can be found online.
The REM folks were planning to include the metro stations from the get-go, but the studies, plans and financing were unclear when the project was rush-announced in April 2016 (who knows why, perhaps to make sure the VIA rail announcement to build the High-Frequency-Rail between Montreal and Toronto using the tunnel would come afterwards). In the end it provided a very convenient obvious error in the project that most people complained about first, which could be fixed, while pulling in some extra financing, and hiding all the other problems.
Kind of now with the REM 2.0: propose something that has a bunch of issues, but have a big glaring issue that everybody jumps on (elevated train on Rene Levesque), so eventually fix it by pulling in some external financing (‘if you want a tunnel, you pay for it, but we still own it’), and the most obvious issues just get swept under the rug (like, does this fit into an overall regional transportation plan, is this the best cost-benefit-project we can build, are just shoveling a boat load of money into cdpq’s infrastructure and real estate divisions, does the city want or need this project or something else).