Bus replacements may never happen
The STM is retiring 155 buses and they will not be replaced, reducing the pool of buses it operates. I don’t like the Gazette’s deck here that says “Valérie Plante shifted some blame to Quebec” because she’s been begging for more transit money for years.
carswell 12:42 on 2024-04-16 Permalink
You may not like it but the Gazoo’s mostly suburban readers probably lap it up.
bob 13:18 on 2024-04-16 Permalink
Well, she could cut the corruption budget by a few percent and buy all the buses she wants.
Nicholas 15:04 on 2024-04-16 Permalink
One big issue is electric buses. While a diesel (hybrid or not) bus can last all day, the electric buses need to be recharged once or twice a day, especially when it’s cold, which takes time. So you need more buses to cover the charging time. Which costs more money. And then you need more garage space. Which costs more money and land. And you need to pay driver time to drive the extra trips back and forth to the garages. Battery buses have a lot of drawbacks, especially in cold climates, and they’re not a mature technology. We could have bought trolley buses, which have been around for decades, but that would require “ugly” wires. So the city made this call, and here we are, and this is the result. (Also we’re short on drivers, so getting more buses may not be a priority now.)
Kate 16:33 on 2024-04-16 Permalink
bob, are you convinced that city hall is as corrupt now as it was under Tremblay?
bob 17:21 on 2024-04-16 Permalink
I don’t think the general level or character of corruption changes very much. And I think that most of it ends up being legitimized by the bureaucracy – the impenetrable bureaucracy itself is a form of corruption, as is the Kafkaesque complexity of law in Quebec. How many cones do you need for the sake of safety? Some unknown entity will promulgate some standard and now we need a cone every meter instead of every two meters. let’s be utterly unbiased by hiring a consultant to study the cone-related regulatory process, and give them $500,000 to write a report that adds no new information, but suggest renting more cones – the city RENTS traffic cones. Maybe hire a bunch of consultants to consult on how to hire consultants. Better still, subcontract the hiring of consultation consultants to a nominally para-municipal entity, which can then hire its own consultants to advise it on how to hire consultants. Bring that $500k up to millions. The people making these Gordian knots of rules, regulations, processes, protocols, etc. are the people who end up making money by exploiting the useless application of those rules.
I read a piece somewhere recently, maybe even CBC, about how the federal government was hiring so many consultants to do the jobs of some civil servants that it was destroying morale because the civil servants had nothing to do. You don’t need paper bags being passed to have corruption. It becomes a way of life, a part of the economy, a methodology trained into business students and engineers as if it were the ethical, responsible way of doing things.
Ian 21:29 on 2024-04-16 Permalink
I am intimately familiar with the unfolding federal allocation scandal, and how deep it goes.Federal consultant scandals aside,, this is Montreal,, not Ottawa. It is an entirely different dynamic.
Your rant sounds like a lot of easy-to-digest unsubstantiated conspiracy theory. Let me guess “bob”, you’re a fan of “small government” as the neocons say, right before they start “trimming the fat” in classic neoliberal style?
I have yet to meet anyone pushing a deregulation agenda as “common sense” that didn’t have an ulterior motive.
Traffic cones are as bad as brown envelopes, compelling. Please, enlighten us.