Montreal City Weblog

Kate 08:16 on 2024-09-14 Permalink Reply  

• Meezly 11:20 on 2024-09-14 Permalink

  Montreal isn’t the only city whose public transit revenue has been suffering, but it’s astounding that they would remove 7 lines and not have any existing lines pick up the slack.

  According to the article, the STM cut the only bus line that connected Verdun and LaSalle. And cut another bus that took St-Henri residents to and from the nearest metro. Even before the pandemic, many passengers had to take two buses, the metro and walk to commute to work. This is what I had to do during the winter when I had to commute from the Plateau to Griffintown, which would sometimes take a whole hour – more time than someone who lived out in the burbs to get to the same destination, even though my commute had much less distance to travel!

  After decades and decades of this, the STM still doesn’t understand that buses shouldn’t be mere shuttles for metro drop-offs/pickups and should also work independently of metro lines. A person in a wheelchair shouldn’t need to take two buses and a metro to get to another neighbourhood, but take one bus to get to their destination. But now it seems some areas don’t even have that option anymore!

• Ephraim 12:19 on 2024-09-14 Permalink

  @Meezly – The 24 still ends at the Angus yards… they closed in 1992! So at the end you have to switch to the 185 to go further. At some point, someone should have realized that this needs to be redone. Either you don’t need the frequency of the 24 past the Sherbrooke metro or you need it down to Pie IX and then adjust the 185. But it’s over 30 years of a bus taking people to a repair shop that no longer exists.

  I wonder if the STM has enough data to actually determine WHERE buses should be going. And so, the REM will be there. So, do we even know enough to plan the routes. Like what happens with the 164, which travels 2 blocks away from the REM station. There are hundreds of such decisions to make and they all impact traffic. Should we start/end buses at REM stations and therefore treat the buses as feeders into the system and reroute the lines as collectors? Well, you need data. Does the STM even have that data? Because you need to look at the passes as to where they get on the bus to tell where they got off the bus.

• Meezly 13:34 on 2024-09-14 Permalink

  @Ephraim, wow, the 24 ending at Angus yards is a perfect example of STM’s bus route planning incompetency. It really seems to be some bizarre byzantine systemic issue within their bureaucracy. Are all the planners old white guys who’ve had the same position since the 1980s and who never take the bus?

  I spoke with one STM planner once some years ago, when I wrote an email complaining about this very thing and he actually phoned me to follow up on it. He was very friendly and listened to what I had to say. He even claimed to ride the 24 regularly, but in the end he defended his position that they consider all kinds of factors when planning their bus routes. Not much, if at all, had improved.

• Kevin 13:38 on 2024-09-14 Permalink

  There are a lot of bus routes that only make sense if nobody making decisions ever goes to certain neighbourhoods.
  Take NDG and the overcrowded 105 along Sherbrooke. It’s a perpetual mess, with long delays, and it can take 10-15 minutes to get through the few blocks over the Decarie Expressway. If you’re heading to or from the Loyola campus.

  There’s an alternative from Villa Maria metro that runs along Monkland — but it only runs every half hour. In fact, it’s the only bus that runs between Grand and Sherbrooke – because the 103 veers north.

  If you want to go to the Benny Library or Sports Centre via transit, the 162 is your only option.

  Makes no sense to me.

• Nicholas 14:36 on 2024-09-14 Permalink

  Meezly, they didn’t remove the lines and not have others pick up the slack. The article notes the STM saying it wasn’t a reduction in service, but a restructuring: some lines were removed, others were changed, some lines got more frequent service. And the article did not say the STM cut the only bus line between LaSalle and Verdun; it says it cut the line that went from her neighbourhood in LaSalle to the south of Verdun. There are multiple buses that connect LaSalle and Verdun: the 107, the 112, the 114, the 37. I don’t know exactly where she lives, but if she took the 58 it’s almost surely in the part of LaSalle south of the aqueduct, and likely closer to LaSalle Boulevard. The issue for her is that the 112, which serves the south western part of that area of LaSalle (around rue Centrale south of Bishop Power), goes to the Jolicoeur metro, while the 107, which serves Wellington (but is on Bannantyne over the summer while Wellington is pedestrianized), goes along Champlain Boulevard next to the aqueduct. And the 61, which goes along LaSalle Bouelvard (and Wellington when open) only goes as far west as the Douglas Hospital. So her specific trip, from very southern LaSalle to very southern Verdun, no longer has a direct bus, but requires a transfer to the metro or the other bus (which, admittedly, could be timed most of the day but aren’t, though both the 107 and 112 run about every 7-8 minutes during rush hour). But if you ran one bus along the aqueduct on Champlain and one along the river along LaSalle, the buses wouldn’t cross in the middle as they do now, so you couldn’t transfer without a lot of walking. And if you have a bus from everywhere to everywhere then you split service so much that each line will have very infrequent service.

  When Kate last posted about this before the change, I noted the biggest problem was going to be path dependency. This person picked a daycare that was on a bus line from her house, so she could “trip chain”, as they call it: do multiple errands/trips at once (usually on the way to or from work). She planned her life, maybe even her home and job (and definitely daycare, groceries, etc) around bus routes on the ground at the time. Now the routes have changed, and her chaining doesn’t work anymore. It’s hard to change a job or home, but easy to change grocery stores, and had she been able to easily switch her daycare to one on the line now closer to her, or had her kid been a bit older or younger, this change wouldn’t have been so bad. There are tons of things like this, where most people can easily adapt, many people get slightly better off, but a few people have their routines totally disrupted. And as a fan of redesigns (you do need to adjust service to account for decades of new housing, commercial, changing travel patterns), this is the biggest problem with them, and one that’s hard to account for in the data and often paid less attention to.

  The situation for wheelchair users is an utter disgrace, and though the article notes that Atwater will have elevators by the end of the year (late), most stations are still without them, and there is no plan to fix this (there are plans for what to do, but a plan without money is a wish), and every level of government, and us as a society, should be ashamed. In 18 months the Montreal Metro will be the only rapid transit system in the country without step-free access at every station, and if we allocate money at the rate we have been (and we aren’t; currently all funded projects should end next year) then we’ll be finished in the 2040s.

  Ephraim, the 24 actually has more service east of Sherbrooke metro, with some rush hour buses only doing that segment. I assume this is because the service is needed to the eastern Plateau (which has middling service for such a dense area), while the bus is so slow downtown, where it’s a block from the Green line, that people would rather use the metro west of Sherbrooke metro.

  As well, Ephraim, the ARTM does actually have pretty good data. Besides all the OPUS taps (which doesn’t let you see where people get off, but you can estimate it pretty well based on transfers and where people get on for a return trip), the ARTM has an origin-destination survey, that asks people for all their trips of any type (car, bike, transit, walk) on the day before they fill out the survey. It’s done every five years, with the last completed study in 2018, and I was mailed a survey last summer for the 2023 one. This is a global best practice, and I’m told they do it well, having done it since 1970.

  Lastly (sorry!), I don’t understand the first person’s story. It says he lives in St Henri and works in the Dorval Industrial Park (yes, I found his employer on his LinkedIn), and used to use two buses (including the 191), a metro, and an electric foot scooter, and the trip surely went up to Ville Saint Laurent and then down Cote de Liesse. The 36 today runs the exact same route along Notre Dame as the 191 did in St Henri (except a slight change eastbound from the 191, which used St Jacques), with easy access to the Place St Henri metro in both cases (though easier once the new entrance is open this fall). Depending on where he lives, the 35 or 38 might also work just as well or better, or even the 17. And though I assume he used the electric foot scooter in Dorval once he got off the 460 or 202, pretty much all of St Henri is within 1 km of the Orange line, which was probably almost always going to be faster than the bus unless you had great timing. I know the area well, and don’t understand how this redesign changed his trip much, other than the number of the bus he uses. But his work, in the industrial park, is just not easy to get to from anywhere without a car.

• Na 19:28 on 2024-09-14 Permalink

  The 107 doesn’t serve Wellington, it normally runs along Verdun St. but due to construction there is currently on Bannantyne. Nor does it run along Champlain, that’s what the 112 takes to get to Jolicoeur metro station

• Meezly 12:15 on 2024-09-15 Permalink

  @Nicholas Thanks for taking the time to analyze this and correcting a generalization I made. For the LaSalle woman, the 58 elimination had created a void in her area that used to connect Lasalle residents to Verdun and apparently she has 5K unhappy signatures to back her up. It seems the “restructuring” was done because the bus routes were already split so much that many lines had infrequent service. We don’t need buses to go from everywhere to everywhere but where some areas have been improved with the restructuring, new bus vacuums had been created. The STM should have taken more care in this.

  Speaking of the 61, that’s one route that underwent some recent “restructuring”. They seem to have cut many of its stops along Wellington, but not sure as I don’t take it that far west. But what impacts me, if I ever need to commute to work this winter, is that the 61 no longer starts/ends at McGill station, but at Peel.

  From what I heard from complaints in another forum, the 168 is now the only bus that goes south from McGill station, and it only runs every 30 minutes, even during rush hour. So the 61 was a bus that supplemented the 168 during the non-rush periods. What was nice was that I could get off the 80 at Place des Arts, walk to McGill, and catch either the 168 or 61.

  Now, if I want to catch the more frequent 61 at Peel during the winter, I will need to do the dreaded and unavoidable bus-metro-bus dance to get to work in a timely manner. I lived in central Vancouver and the bus routes are long and you can cross multiple neighbourhoods. You may go in a roundabout manner, but you wouldn’t have to transfer buses or take the SkyTrain.

  In Montreal, it’s very inconvenient to cross central neighbourhoods in a north-south direction because the bus routes are so fragmented due to the dependency on the metro. I know I’m not the only one unhappy about this. The 61 seemed to have filled one vacuum at Peel, but created a new one at McGill. Why can’t the STM expand the 61 so that it picks up and drops off passengers from Peel AND McGill? Sure, I can “adapt” to this, but I live and work in the heart of Montreal, and to me, a 1+ hour commute to work is unacceptable when knowing that with some simple route adjustments, there could be one bus that could service the Plateau to Griffintown.