Nine CMM towns have no transit
Nine of the 82 towns in the Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM) have no public transit despite making obligatory contributions to the ARTM: Calixa‑Lavallée, L’Île‑Cadieux, Les Cèdres, Pointe‑des‑Cascades, St‑Isidore, St‑Jean-Baptiste, St‑Mathieu, St‑Philippe and Vaudreuil‑sur‑le‑Lac. Some find this unfair.
DeWolf 11:21 on 2024-09-07 Permalink
As the ARTM executive notes, this is how taxes work: we all pay for collective benefits, not individual benefits.
At the same time the ARTM’s statement to the mayor of Saint-Jean-Baptiste (who asked about getting transit) is pretty galling: nope! We aren’t expanding transit in the next 10 years! Lovely attitude that has surely trickled down from our anti-transit overlords in Quebec City.
Ian 11:28 on 2024-09-07 Permalink
I think a better metaphor would be fire services – even if there are way more fires in the city because of population density and soforth, even out in the sticks you expect to be able to call 911 if your kitchen catches fire.
Having less service can be explained away, but none at all?
This is nothing like paying school tax if you don’t have kids, this is being entirely excluded from services despite being billed for them, basically like asling “Why” and being told “Screw you, that’s why”.
Nicholas 01:16 on 2024-09-08 Permalink
This is a tough case. In some cases some of these towns should have some service, even if it is only every hour or two, or only at rush hour. But in a lot of these cases these towns are really far out and hard to serve, and ~100% of people who live there would have a car even if they had service because service every hour or two is not reliable or quick, so it’s not unreasonable to drive a few minutes to another stop, or a train station.
Also, a few of these municipalities are tiny, and really hard to serve. L’Île‑Cadieux is like a single road on an island and it’d be hard to even turn a minibus around beyond the town hall. And it and Vaudreuil‑sur‑le‑Lac are the size of neighbourhoods. Look at the adjacent Wildwood and Les Floralies du Lac neighbourhood in Vaudreuil-Dorion: they get no service, but V-D does as a whole, so they’re also paying for no service even though the city gets service. Should each neighbourhood get service? How much? Eventually you spread everything out so much that the places that can support it most get cut while buses run empty along what’s almost a private road. It’s rare to have a country where everyone gets transit. Switzerland has a societal value that every single person should have some transit access, which is why they famously serve this town of like 7 homes a few times a day, but we are just too big and too spread out and not rich enough to do it. If having a separate municipality meant you got better service or lower taxes than a similar neighbourhood part of a large municipality, it would create some weird incentives.
Also, Radio-Canada missed my favourite tiny municipality: L’Île-Dorval. It also is part of the CMM and gets no public transit.
Kate 09:48 on 2024-09-08 Permalink
Nicholas, non-residents aren’t even allowed ashore on Île-Dorval, so how would you arrange transit? Anyway, from what I’ve heard, it’s not occupied year round except for one or two caretakers.
Ian 09:23 on 2024-09-10 Permalink
So my curiosity was piqued and I just went downa deep rabbithoel about Dorval Island aka Île-Dorval aka L’Île-Dorval (Nicholas is correct, the official orthography changed some years ago) and while it is true that there are no permanent residents on the island since the last census, all the cottage owners stil count as population – even thought the ferry only runs May-October. Looking on Google maps satellite view some of those “cottages’ definitely look winterized and woudl fit right in along the shore in Baie-D’Urfé. Don’t get excited about being a caretaker, the city site shows no open posiitons.
Anyhow the one thing I couldn’t find out was about flooding. Looking at the new flood zone maps, I noticed something really weird. Compared to the nearby, much larger but uninhabited Dowker isaland that is about 4/5 flood zone, Dorval Island appears to have no flooding at all … is this really correct?
dhomas 13:42 on 2024-09-10 Permalink
@Ian It looks like it was on a flood zone map, but was removed:
https://globalnews.ca/news/5734566/quebec-removes-17-municipalities-flood-zone-maps/