Second CAQ budget vs the city
The second CAQ budget came down Tuesday. There’s no immediate money for the orange line extension to Bois-Franc. The CAQ is playing the game so many Quebec governments have played: it’s proposing instead a study of extending that branch of the line all the way to Laval.
The CAQ is also proposing to “decongest” the city with a new north-south axis in the east end – that will be studied, too.
We can’t seem to get this right. Either we spend 30 years glacially studying a metro extension anyone could see would be beneficial, while the pension fund, for godsake, simply hands down the REM without any studies, just “do this” and it gets built, without a word from the transit commission or the urban studies people at the universities.
Also not in the budget: money for social housing. Valérie Plante is disappointed in the CAQ’s choice to ignore the city’s housing crisis.
Francesco 09:57 on 2020-03-11 Permalink
The language on page 24 that basically makes empty promises — essentially “we will study again because we like studies instead of actions” — includes a bizarre notion of extending the REM from Bois-Franc into central Laval, and sending a stub from Bois-Franc down to the ersatz orange line terminus at Côte-Vertu. None of this makes any sense. Apart from the fact that there is no room for a surface or aerial train in either direction there — from Émile-Nelligan to the Back River is built up, same for Côte-Vertu to Poirier — but again, the Orange Line tunnel already extends to Poirier (and is too narrow for the wider REM vehicles).
Then there’s the silliness of the concept: connection of the Orange Line to the REM is urgent, in part, because of the tidal wave of development in the Decarie/40 sector; a Royalmount resident going to YUL would need to schlepp across Decarie to the metro, ride two stops, surface, change to the REM, ride 2km to Bois-Franc, then change to an airport train? They’d hop in an Uber is what they’d do.
Ian 12:56 on 2020-03-11 Permalink
That whole area around Royalmount is a mess. My wife worked literally 10 minutes by bus the other side of the triangle in VSL west of Acadie and it took her as long to get to work from Mile End (metro, 2 buses) as it takes for me to get to Ste Anne (bus, metro, bus). It’s absurd what an utter shitshow the Triangle is. It takes me about 45 minutes to an hour to drive to Ste Anne depending on how many people are on the road and about half that time is just getting past the Triangle. It’s full of trucks no matter what time of day it is because whether you are going to Laval or the Champlain or VSL or downtown or the big box outlets or wherever all the trucks have to pass through that bottleneck, and they are traveling all hours of the day.
That said it’s 14 minutes to Gare Ahuntsic by the 179 from the Rockland Centre… shame the existing train doesn’t connect to the airport.
Francesco 17:25 on 2020-03-11 Permalink
Succinctly, if one doesn’t live directly within the Metro’s catchment, or isn’t a 9-to-5 downtown commuter from Roxboro or Beaconsfield, public transit in Greater Montreal has *always* been a dysfunctional mess. For over 30 years from 1966-on, my dad drove himself (or more often, got a lift) from central Pierrefonds to Roxboro CN station and took the train to work in the morning and back home again at night. This at a time when road commuter traffic was almost nonexistent and gas cost a smaller percentage of the budget it does today.
When I started commuting to school in Westmount, I tried every mode and route Via public transit and none of it worked well. 24-walk 2 km-CN train-205 all over Creation-walk a km wasn’t a very nice way to get home after a long day!
Now with REM we have an opportunity to make transit throughout Greater Montreal infinitely better, but we’re dithering on the most simple, logical projects that would ensure it. After a big push throughout 2019, we haven’t heard a peep about the Dorval REM extension since before the federal election last fall. Let’s hope Marc Garneau will have an update with positive news soon, as the TBM starts boring under the airport this spring. I’ve read many ambiguous reports about the PQI and its targets since last night and similarly hope that the summaries that include Christian Dubé’s mention of the Orange extension are actually correct.