The metro opened 55 years ago
The Montreal metro opened for passenger service exactly 55 years ago. Radio-Canada ponders things that have changed and things that have stayed the same.
However, the STM is now hurting, with revenues down and its director saying it needs more cash or will have to cut services back starting next year. And as we know from Denis Coderre’s cuts to transit, when you reduce services you also reduce demand by giving many passengers a reason to abandon public transit. It becomes self-perpetuating.
How this pans out will partly depend on how widespread and persistent the trend to work from home remains. If only half the pre‑pandemic ridership is using the services now, as was recently estimated, and those numbers don’t recover soon, it would make sense to cut back services – but not to the point that they become useless.
Kevin 18:19 on 2021-10-14 Permalink
Transit use is down everywhere because commuting is down, and work from home is not going away. (The TTC is optimistically projecting that transit levels will return to prepandemic levels at the end of 2023, but their projections have a very large margin of error)
This is something that should be discussed during the municipal campaign.
We also need to discuss a complete rethink of downtown as a destination because businesses are moving to a new model — in all cities, not just Montreal — and we will never go back to having 300,000 people coming downtown five days a week.
DeWolf 18:21 on 2021-10-14 Permalink
Transit services need to be reoriented towards providing reliable, high-frequency service throughout the day, not just at rush hours. If we want to get people out of their cars, we need to make it very easy to do anything by transit. The fact that isn’t the case even in some of the densest neighbourhoods in Montreal is a big problem.
Orr 10:18 on 2021-10-16 Permalink
Public transport is what carbon tax (and don’t forget to tax the carbon in the actual oil/coal exports, not just its extraction and transport to the ports) should be paying for.
And it should be paying the amount that makes public transport rapid, reliable, and free.
We need to get serious real soon to cut fossil fuel use 50% by 2030.