REM will kill Mascouche train, some say
Linda Gyulai continues with her series on the REM, looking at how the new train will kill the Mascouche commuter service.
This isn’t to slam Gyulai, who always does excellent work, but everything she’s been telling us about the REM was predicted by ant6n a couple of years ago. He looked at the plans and their likely consequences and, hey, here they are.
The Mascouche line only opened in 2014 and was damnably expensive. Reports on its overruns were a regular news item for years.
ant6n 11:38 on 2019-09-29 Permalink
Even in the first months after the project was announced, a lot of the issues that are being talked about now were already foreseeable, my write-up of my first meeting with the REM people and thoughts back in 2016 had most of them right there (including the line by one of the Spokespeople that there will be no shut downs during constructions, maybe a weekend or two — the same person who now gives presentations of their half-arsed mitigation measures during years of shutdowns).
It was an incredibly frustrating experience seeing this thing slowly unfold, knowing that a bunch of rather smallish different choices along the way could’ve made this a pretty good project rather than the mess it is. But it seems our governance, processes and our politicians (Federal, Provincial 1, Provincial 2, Municipal 1, Municipal 2) where not able to deal with this. And the CDPQInfra people just kept straight up lying when issues came up, rather than fixing them…