The STM has presented a balanced budget for 2025 but more money is needed for maintenance and for other projects, like installing elevators in more stations.
Updates from November, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Opening of the REM to Deux-Montagnes and Anse-à-l’Orme has been delayed to fall 2025 after first being promised for last year. Testing of these branches also means planned shutdowns of the existing line to Brossard, with bus replacements in place.
Nicholas
The delay is par for the course, and no one should believe their confidence in their opening date when they had confidence before, but no weekend service for two to three months, and no service at all for four to six weeks? This honestly might be worse than the Ottawa LRT!
CE
I think the plan is to make sure everything is done right so it doesn’t end up like the O-Train .
Nicholas
Well with this announcement, arguably it has. (Deux-Montagnes closed longer than Trillium Line, more planned closures for Brossard than Confederation, unable to handle wind vs ice, random regular closures/failures, longer time to open the airport branch, etc.)
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Kate
A train carrying hydrogen peroxide has derailed in Longueuil and part of highway 116 is closed and in a perimeter nearby, residents have been advised to stay inside. VIA Rail service to Quebec City has also been interrupted.
The coupe Longueuil always looks better in blonde, anyway.
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Kate
A shipping site says that the issue causing the strike/lockout at the Port of Montreal is that the employer wants to bring in automation using artificial intelligence, while the union says this will cut about half the positions at the port. A union spokesman says “It’s time to stop the machines from taking our jobs.”
Paul
I saw Terminator 2.
I support them!Kate
In 1831, my several-times-great-uncle Samuel Macey was convicted of participating in an action to destroy threshing machines on a farm in Wiltshire, England. He was sentenced to be transported to Tasmania. But it was the same fight.
In 1978, workers at the Montreal Star went on strike for months in response to the introduction of computerized phototypesetting. The strike lasted eight months and the paper closed down not long afterwards. Same fight.
There are so many examples. I’ve only mentioned two that I know of. The problem is that every time, the technical improvements benefit the owner class, and it’s the workers who get shafted.
When I was young, there was a lot of sunny talk about how technology would bring us more leisure. That depends, of course, on how you define us.
su
Odd how that issue has received no mention on our local and national news.
Last night it was all about the strike’s effects on GDP growth, supply chains, and the upcoming shopping season.Kate
That’s why I found the World Cargo News item interesting, su.
Joey
They covered this in The Wire – season two, I think. They had a team present the automation system implemented in Rotterdam to the union leadership in Baltimore. I suspect you can imagine the look on their faces as they watched the containers unload themselves…
su
The port terminals have been privatised since the advent of the push toward global growth a few decades ago. The growing demands for public and private investment in ports, precipitated by the growth in world trade, and the limited abilities of governments to meet these needs because of competing investment priorities, were key factors. Thus, while few were willing to go as far as the UK in the total privatization of ports, many countries were willing to consider awarding concessions as an intermediate form of privatization, leading to various forms of public-private partnerships.
saintlaurent
The Amalgamated Union of Blacksmiths, Switchboard & Telegraph Operators, Bank Tellers, Horse Collar Artisans and Loom Weavers is ready to stand in solidarity with the longshoremen.
Chris
>The problem is that every time, the technical improvements benefit the owner class…
Do you mean exclusively? Disproportionally?
The average man has benefited plenty too. Would you actually prefer to live in a world without threshing machines and computerized phototypesetting? Maybe you would, but I doubt most would.
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Kate
The Christmas fair Noël dans le parc has been held at Place Émilie‑Gamelin for seven years, but will move to the Quartier des spectacles this year because conditions around Émilie‑Gamelin have become so louche.
I think this is how civilization retreats from some areas and leaves them to fester. I wish it weren’t so.
Joey 13:29 on 2024-11-15 Permalink
So… Geneviève Guilbault was right?
Kate 16:58 on 2024-11-15 Permalink
In what sense, Joey?
Joey 13:29 on 2024-11-16 Permalink
That the transit agencies had fat to trim.
Kate 19:54 on 2024-11-16 Permalink
It’s balanced on paper, but with a huge proviso that they really need more money. I don’t know anything about the STM’s hierarchy, but it never reads to me like they have a lot of middle management that could be axed. What they have is a list of maintenance and upgrades that have to be done.