Montreal City Weblog

Kate 16:16 on 2024-04-18 Permalink Reply  

• carswell 16:25 on 2024-04-18 Permalink

  Had a dental appointment downtown late this morning. As has been the case for several months now, whenever I have to be somewhere, including concerts, at an appointed hour, I took a slower bus-only route instead of risking the metro. What good is a public transit system that is increasingly unreliable? If I’d missed my appointment, I would have been charged a hefty fee too, so such outages are not only inconvenient but potentially costly.

• Kate 11:33 on 2024-04-19 Permalink

  Going downtown over the mountain can be nice if the bus isn’t too crowded.

• carswell 13:14 on 2024-04-19 Permalink

  True that though the bus I take to go to my dentist’s office is the 129 sud (+ the 24 ouest in inclement weather) and that only runs about once every 25-30 minutes outside of rush hour, a frequency that doesn’t always mesh with my needs.

  But thinking more about the larger issue leaves me with other questions. For example, if someone releasing pepper spray in a minor station can shut down all or significant parts of the orange, blue and green lines for hours, if there is no quick or affordable infrastructure fix (Agora has a discussion as to why) and if these incidents are happening regularly, does that mean we should give up on or at least not favour further developing the underground? When your bus is immobilized, you can get off and take another bus, hail a taxi, hop on a Bixi or walk to your destination and arrive more or less on time. Not the case for people stuck in a tunnel and not necessarily the case if you’re part of a horde forced to vacate a metro station, when competition for a taxi, Bixi or place on a bus can suddenly become fierce.

  Also, can anything be done to deter pepper spray attacks in the metro? Would drastically increasing the sanctions for an event that brings the system to a halt at great cost to the STM, law enforcement and passengers work? Say, sending perpetrators to the slammer for years and/or forcing them to spend the rest of their lives working to pay back the cost of their crime (including compensating passengers who missed their flights, for example) and/or declaring them unfit to be parents with all the consequences that entails?

• Kevin 14:02 on 2024-04-19 Permalink

  The catch is that Villa isn’t a minor station. Between it and Snowdon there is another tunnel that goes under Decarie to Queen Mary, part of the long-planned garage that will require more digging.

• carswell 17:04 on 2024-04-19 Permalink

  I hesitated over the choice of “minor” but, considering the transfer stations (Berri-UQAM, Lionel-Groulx, Snowdon and Jean-Talon) major, it’s the best I could come up with. The point being that it’s not a transfer station and yet an incident can bring to a halt lines (the green line, for example) that are nowhere near it. Also, in terms of traffic, VM is not a major station. But however VM is categorized, my questions still stand.