Construction making orange line sluggish
Despite STM plans to add trains and shorten wait times on the orange line at rush hour, some users have not felt any improvement. The STM is blaming this on delays caused by the underground garage construction at Côte-Vertu, and the jam mostly takes place on the line’s western side, giving those passengers a taste of what it can be like on a train coming down from MoMo at 8 a.m.
They’d best get used to it, because once the REM starts running, it’ll be like that all the time.
Kevin 09:40 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
This is how dedicated straphangers become car owners. When it takes almost an hour to get downtown from NDG, and you spend the whole way packed like a sardine, the extra expense of a vehicle is justified by the lack of BO and the return of personal space.
Kate 09:49 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
But from Vendôme it’s just 2 stops to L-G, and then you can go to the green line if you want. It’s not all that long a ride even if you stay on the orange line till Square Vicky or thereabouts.
All last year I was riding down to L-G from Jarry, so forgive me if I find the trip from NDG negligible by comparison.
If the schedule works, you know what’s great? Take the train from Vendôme downtown. It’s minutes and it’s never crowded. Of course the schedule almost never does work.
jeather 10:28 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
The green line downtown is not exactly a relaxing empty train in the morning either. I’m generally packed in as a sardine also, and can’t always fit on the first train. (L-G headed east.)
Blork 10:52 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
What I find even more stressful than being packed into a Metro car is when the platform is packed and you have to wait 2 or 3 trains before you can squeeze in. If that happens only occasionally it’s fine (lucky for me it rarely happens) but I really feel for the people on the Orange line around Rosemont and whatnot, many of whom (I hear) experience this every day.
Kevin 11:16 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
Kate, just getting to the metro line has become a nightmare this year. It’s not unusual for buses to take 15 minutes to move 5 blocks around Vendome. e.g. https://twitter.com/terryomtl/status/1171911101061193728
I’ve developed a new habit: I don’t go anywhere through NDG, be it public transit or on my own wheels, without checking real-time traffic maps and coming up with a new route.
Jack 11:27 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
@ Kevin that BO thing is getting old. One thing that’s not is your car’s exhaust contributing to our species extinction. Keep up the good work !
ant6n 13:58 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
The CP-line between Mo-West and Vendome is a low hanging fruit for potential rapid transit… There’s been low level talk that the A(R)TM wanted to buy the line for what feels like decades. And incidentally, the Pink Line as proposed before the elections was going along that corridor as well.
Mark Côté 15:04 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
Indeed, recently I walked about 20 minutes to both Villa Maria and Snowdon and beat several buses there. It’s fine for now but not going to be fun if this continues in the winter.
I haven’t considered taking the train though… I should look into that.
Frankie 15:20 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
Twice in the last two weeks, there have been shouting matches in my Metro car between people getting angry about pushing. The argument yesterday actually escalated to the “Meet me outside” level. Once on the Orange line and once on the Green line. There was also a shouting match between two women last week on the no. 10 bus, also about stop pushing, you are in my way stuff. It is only going to get worse in the winter when everyone is wearing heavy coats with those furry hoods. One way around this is to really get companies to buy into the work from home option.
Kate 15:36 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
Mark Côté, it’s not logical, but I believe you would need to have extra tickets on your Opus card to do that, although the new Exo site is so cumbersome I can’t tell what the fare zones are any more.
Kevin 20:17 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
Jack
Has being holier-than-thou ever convinced anyone? Especially when the person with pretensions is wrong?
I only drive a car when doing groceries or travelling with at least one other person. My commuting vehicle is a motorcycle.
Either way, the impact from my family’s vehicles does nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Globally, transportation is only 14% of GHG emissions. Demanding every driver change their life happens to be an easy target for the holier-than-thou crowd, even if it’s ineffective.
Get countries and companies to ditch their coal, natural gas, or oil-burning electrical plants, which produce about half of the world’s GHG’s, and we’ll never talk about climate change again. We need to take the big steps, not little ones.
And honestly, the stench of others is a serious deterrent. Forget fare dodgers – the STM needs a campaign to tell people to bathe and use deodorant and use less cologne.
Filp 22:36 on 2019-09-12 Permalink
Okay let’s exaggerate a bit less now. I’ve been taking the most crowded part of the network every day for years, and have not experienced seriously foul smelling people at the frequency which you describe. Maybe once every month , about the same amount as passing someone smelly on the street. If the smell of public transit is seriously the reason to take your car, you never really considered transit in the first place. Lol
Of course I’m not implying that overcrowding and busses being stuck in traffic aren’t deterrents. Just that smell is something that gets mentioned constantly (almost always by people who rarely take transit) as being a major issue. It simply isn’t. Like something my aunt would mention at Easter about the one time she took the metro (in 1990)
Kevin 07:34 on 2019-09-13 Permalink
Flip
I never mentioned a frequency…
I rely on public transit about 5 months a year and encounter a serious assault on my nostrils in a metro car at least 2x a week. More if I take the bus, so I rarely take the bus.
There are puddles of urine on the platform at the metro station near my office at least 4 days a week, but they don’t seem to care much about that.
Shit, now that they clean up pretty quickly, but that’s only a once-a-year thing. And last year it was diarrhea from a dog, not a human.
Kate 07:50 on 2019-09-13 Permalink
Some people do have more sensitive noses, and some buses serve areas where more physical labour is done, meaning people occasionally do smell of sweat on the hotter days of the year. I ride buses and the metro daily yet I don’t encounter stinky people as often as Kevin does, although it happens. On the other hand, I’ve never seen puddles of platform pee. Not once.
Blork 10:06 on 2019-09-13 Permalink
The old saw about BO can be interpreted as a general dislike of being squeezed up next to people due to issues around personal space and whatnot. For most people it’s not really about the BO, it’s about the psychological discomfort of being pressed in on all sides by people.
This is made worse in people who have anxiety disorders, which is in no way rare or obscure, and is significantly on the rise in recent years. (Some estimates say one in five people have some level of anxiety disorder.) Psychologies are now treating people with “climate anxiety” on a regular basis, plus things like the global rise in populism and the way all of the bad news is constantly bombarding people on social media is creating a new “age of anxiety” right now, and nothing sends anxiety through the roof (for many people) like being crammed onto a subway or bus with hundreds of people where you can’t move, can’t escape, etc.
So no, it’s not really about the BO.
Meezly 16:32 on 2019-09-13 Permalink
I’m a HSP with an aversion to crowds, and most likely the former informs the latter.
Public transit during rush hour is horrible but I would also hate the money-sink and headache involved with car ownership in the Plateau.
Cheap perfume is what my sensitive nasal passages encounter most, then smokers reeking of tar and toxins. I take transit in winter, but notice the BO factor is higher during summer, esp. when synthetic fibres are so common. And then there are the zombies who cannot be unglued from their devices no matter how packed the train or bus gets.
What gets me through these trying transit times are a pair of good headphones, reading material and a nicely scented scarf to put over my nose!
JP 01:44 on 2019-09-14 Permalink
I recently became a car owner after three years of commuting from New Bordeaux/Ahuntsic to Pointe Claire. It wasn’t the length of the commute or the transfers or the BO. But, what it was can be boiled down to personal space and not having to deal with other users. It had never been an issue in the past when I used mostly the metro to get to cegep and university. However, my 470 bus ride involved the following: A young man, probably in his 30s, who’d passively aggressively call me a “bitch” under his breath almost every day (probably because I liked standing in front near the driver…the bus was rarely that full, so it was doable, but he liked that spot). There were also a few incidents of people clipping their nails. When they made it so that you could get on from any door, people acted really aggressively and uncivilly. At least in my car, there’s no risk of having a naii fly into my face and I don’t have to deal with the same guy verbally abusing me every day. Even with it’s a normal line, people love to pretend to be oblivious and push ahead. On top of avoiding all this, I now get around faster
Meezly 10:09 on 2019-09-14 Permalink
Indeed, with that distance to cover, it made way more sense for you to become a car owner. Just not feasible for me for many reasons. Enjoy your new mode of transport!