STM: 3 to 5 years to get back to normal
The STM saw a ridership increase of 2.9% for 2019, but experts say it will take three to five years to recover from the effects of the pandemic.
I find it puzzling that the metro was racking up much better numbers than the buses. Our buses are not so bad, and – put simply – the bus network goes to a lot of places the metro doesn’t. It’s not as if you can choose only the metro if you happen to be going somewhere beyond the reach of a reasonable walk from a metro station.
One side effect of a general repugnance to public transit is that bike repair shops are going nuts as more people pull out their old junkers from sheds or basements and need help making them roadworthy.
A footnote to local transit: Normand Parisien, who headed Transport 2000 (now Trajectoire Québec) for many years, championing the development of effective public transit in Montreal, died recently.
Thomas H 11:21 on 2020-05-08 Permalink
The frequency and reliability of the bus system has measurably deteriorated in Montreal for the past 5-7 years. Over the same time period, non-driving non-transit alternatives have grown expoentially (Communauto, car2go, Bixi, Uber, to name a few). This time frame also coincided with a high degree of economic prosperity in Montreal, where the rate of car registrations well outpaced population growth. Contrastingly, the metro has in fact increased capacity over the past few years by increasing frequencies from 6 AM to 10 PM and through the added capacity of the AZUR trains. We are now running very near the capacity of the metro system on the orange and green lines without adding new tracks or new trains.
The one or two dozen bus lines that are wildly popular (e.g., 105 Sherbrooke, 121 Côte-Vertu/Sauvé) already run at or near capacity and have for some time. That is to say, running them at higher frequencies would actually slow the service and make it less reliable due to the phenomenon of bus bunching.
There are few cities on this continent that have managed to increase bus ridership over this the past decade. The ones that have (Vancouver, Seattle, perhaps Houston) are characterized by two common factors: a very high population growth rate and a recent complete overhaul of the bus system (usually decreasing the number of routes but increasing frequencies and reliability). Unlike these “newer” cities, however, I wonder if an overhaul here could produce similar results, considering we still have comparatively high bus ridership in general, and that many older folks and long-term residents have their bus route habits ingrained in their DNA.
Blork 11:21 on 2020-05-08 Permalink
Metro vs. bus is complicated. It’s true that buses go to more places, and generally they’re not bad. So for regular commuting on a schedule, it can work. But for irregular “getting around” they don’t work well at all, for various reasons, including:
Unknown routes and schedules. Irregular users likely don’t use the Transit or similar apps, so they don’t really know when the buses are coming or what exactly their routes are. (Compare to the Metro, which is pretty simple and never changes.)
Waiting times. The longest you’ll ever have to wait for a Metro is 10 minutes, and that’s worst-case scenario but at least you’re indoors (assuming the system is up and running). But with buses you are stuck outdoors, and if you miss your bus you might have to wait 20, 30, 40, or more minutes for another one.
Crowding. When the Metro is crowded it can be very unpleasant, but at least you have the option of getting off and waiting for the next one if it’s really getting you down (usually just 3 minutes or so); and you’re waiting indoors. But you might wait 10-12 minutes outdoors in the rain for a bus, and when it arrives it’s too full to board (or too full for you to want to board) and the next one might not be for 15 minutes.
Unpredictable. During commuting times you’d think main routes like the 80 and the 24 would have buses coming every few minutes, and the schedules might even make you believe it. But then you go to a bus stop and you wait and you wait and you wait. In the meantime you see three of your buses pass going the other direction. Finally after 20 minutes your bus arrives; two, three, even four of them bumper to bumper. This isn’t fiction; this is exactly what happens every second time I take the 24.
Comfort and speed. Generally speaking, the Metro moves swiftly and you get the feeling of getting to your destination quickly. And it’s reasonably comfortable, and not particularly jerky. Buses can be really slow; stuck in traffic, poking around small side streets, taking long and convoluted routes, and if you are standing it can be extremely jerky (those Nova buses are really bad with stops and starts; jerkiest buses I’ve ever been on).
Blork 11:48 on 2020-05-08 Permalink
Here are some comparative measurements that might be relevant, although it’s entirely anecdotal. Preamble: sometimes I meet people at Benelux at Sherbrooke and Jeanne-Mance for after-work drinks. That’s 1.9 km from where I work at Ste-Catherine and MacKay. During fine weather I just walk it. But in foul weather I have a choice of taking the Metro or walking up to Sherbrooke and hopping on the 24.
METRO: at first glance the Guy-Concordia Metro is right across the street and over one block. But when you calculate all the turns and ups and downs, it’s about 300 metres from my building’s front door to the actual platform. At the other end it’s almost 500 metres from the platform of PdA to the door of Benelux. 800 metres of walking, so the Metro only takes me about half way. But it is fast.
BUS: Front door of my building to the 24 stop on Sherbrooke is about 400 metres. But it drops me 50 metres from the door of Benelux. So the bus saves me 350 metres of walking. But EVERY SINGLE TIME I choose the 24 I regret it. I’ll be standing at the bus stop for what feels like hours, freezing or getting soaked, and EVERY TIME I realize “I’d be there now if I had taken the Metro” and I’m still waiting for the 24 to arrive.
(All measurements via Google Maps.)
DeWolf 12:14 on 2020-05-08 Permalink
Blork hit the nail on the head. The buses have become unreliable and even the scheduled frequencies are lower than they were 10+ years ago. The 80 used to come every six minutes or less during the day. Now it’s 10 minutes.
Spi 16:29 on 2020-05-08 Permalink
Buses also don’t make much sense in the super-urban core of the city where commercial strips have developed themselves to be near the metro.
I’ll often walk from Park to Laurier or Mont-Royal on the Orange line, it’s a 12-15 walk. Given the frequency (even on busy routes like laurier) and how many stops it’s likely to make + me having to look up the bus schedule and time my movements all of it to save 5-7 minutes? It’s simply not as hassle-free as the short walk. I find most people don’t bother with the bus unless it’s a minimum 1km or they are carrying things with them.
david99 18:04 on 2020-05-08 Permalink
Buses are unreliable, and that’s a killer when it’s super cold outside. Only time I take the bus in winter is when I can pick it up somewhere I’m waiting inside – metro station, whatever. It’s just too cold to stand out there in misery hoping that it shows up.
Blork 18:13 on 2020-05-08 Permalink
The thing about buses is that they look good on paper; transit “planners” see that they require very little dedicated infrastructure (cheap!) and they can go almost anywhere instead of being tied to set routes (flexible!). So from perspective of the white-shirted people who drive to their STM jobs in their Audis and set about determining what a great transit system we’ll have, they look fantastic. But those people rarely if ever actually use the goddamn bus, so they don’t “eat their own dog food” so to speak. Yet another example of where the user experience gets lost among the spreadsheets and catered lunches.
Benoit 18:27 on 2020-05-08 Permalink
I agree with Blork. Case in point: the bureaucrats are very good at adding kilometers of reserved bus lanes, but only where they are easy to add and where they wouldn’t be controversial! For example, they added bus lanes on Viau, between Rosemont and Pierre-de-Coubertin, where these is no traffic at all. But hey, it was easy to add the bus lanes, there were 3 lanes in each direction!
Where it would take courage to add lanes, they don’t. Sherbrooke is a good example, that’s exactly where adding bus lanes would be useful.
Dhomas 08:02 on 2020-05-09 Permalink
@Benoit They DID take the unpopular-with-drivers decision to add a dedicated bus lane on Papineau last year. Maybe we’ll see some courage to do something similar on Sherbrooke someday.
CE 12:31 on 2020-05-09 Permalink
From what I’ve heard, that Papineau lane has made a big different for that route. I have a friend who lives near Papineau and said that the bus lane halted the time of his commute.
mare 14:22 on 2020-05-09 Permalink
The Papineau bus lane addition is all done with paint, and unfortunately the paint that indicates the (new) turning lanes and the merging indicators is almost all scraped off by the snow clearing in the winter. I’ve seen some nearly head-on collisions near St-Zotique were the second driving lane is removed and cars have to merge to one lane. I hope they repaint those soon, only drivers that drive that stretch regularly know how the—quote chaotic—lane situation is along that stretch between Jean-Talon and Bellechasse. Now there are more cars on the road again, a major collision is about to happen.
(Incidentally this is highway 19.)