Do candidates lack ambition for Montreal?
24Hres asked several political commentators whether they felt the mayoral candidates lack ambition for Montreal, since nobody has proposed any big flagship project to catch public attention.
But they all more or less agree that this isn’t the moment for rah‑rah showmanship, but to keep the nose to the grindstone, continue with necessary infrastructure work and manage things responsibly.
For example, Luc Rabouin is proposing express bus routes which are subtly controversial because they would require the loss of parking spaces.
Ian 19:25 on 2025-10-14 Permalink
They should also be controversial becasue they are only one part of the solution – the other part is improving schedules. If the Parc bus doesn’t run more than every 20 minutes in rush hour and is still affected by construction bottlenecks like the unnecessary blockage just north of Mont-Royal no amount of reserved lanes will make any difference, the road could be kept completely clear for all the buses that are not scheduled to run. Of course the funding of the STM relies on the province, which begs the question: what precisely is the point of focusing on bus lanes if we can’t afford more buses?
That said there is no reason for there to be any street parking on Parc.
Nicholas 20:23 on 2025-10-14 Permalink
Does the funding of the STM rely on the province? The STM and other agencies’ operations are funded by the ARTM, which is funded about 32% by municipalities (22% Agglo Montreal, 10% rest), 27% fares, 15% drivers (gas tax, registration tax), 24% province, 2% other. The Agglomeration of Montreal pays about the same as the province, who pays just $1 in $4, and the Agglo, which is controlled by the city, could up its contribution at any time, but chooses not to.
Also, if the bus lanes were actually good, unlike most of the bus lanes we install, we could run a lot more service for the same cost. The 80 takes 24 minutes from Place des Arts to Querbes and Durocher at 5 am, and 43 minutes during evening rush hour. If we could turn the lights green for buses before they got there, rather than just a few seconds earlier, and remove a few stops, we could probably cut service time to under 20 minutes end to end, maybe 50 round trip including breaks. So instead of five vehicles covering both directions spaced every 20 minutes, we could run five vehicles and have them spaced every 10 minutes. And the service would be way faster. Faster and more frequent service is actually cheaper to run than slower and infrequent service. Plus it would attract more riders, which means more fare revenue, so even cheaper to run. Many of the things we can do to speed up service cost very little money (transit signal priority, banning turns from bus lanes, removing parking), but they require a lot of political capital. The question is are they willing to use it.
Ian 20:50 on 2025-10-14 Permalink
Well, Plante blamed provincial funding on not coming through on the Pink Line which was a core campaign promise, and frankly I expect Rabouin to do the same with anything related to STM improvements.
I totally see your point in re-orging the bus lanes and adjusting traffic flow, that seems like an obviously better solution than just reserved bus lanes. Realistically though it was Coderre that first cut bus service and despite all the years PM has been in power we’ve never returned to even those frequencies.
Whether there is the political will really is the issue though and as long as we keep getting forced into things like the REM it’s going to be a long itme before teh bus network gets improved in any meaningful way.
Nicholas 03:20 on 2025-10-15 Permalink
Politician blames someone else for not funding their priority rather than making the hard choices to fund it themselves. Is there anyone who doesn’t do that?
Underfunding transit is a common thing these days. I don’t blame people for making other priorities higher. But it’s a choice, and they all have made that choice, at every level of government, for decades.
And there are low-cost solutions that can do almost as much as high cost ones. But they require tradeoffs, ones that people usually don’t want to make. Some of our biggest successes have been making those tradeoffs: bike lanes and bixis and bioswales that have made streets safer and calmer, but have annoyed drivers. Organizing our public space to give priority to buses, and using electronics to speed them up is cheap, but it’ll also annoy drivers. Is someone willing to do it? It’d be nice if they said so clearly, but I’d take them not being upfront about the tradeoffs and doing it once elected.
Ian 06:25 on 2025-10-15 Permalink
I’d settle for not making empty promises, but here we are, and these are the candiidates we have.
The only advantage new faces have in this is that we don’t know if they are liars… yet.
azrhey 09:48 on 2025-10-15 Permalink
I am reading this at the corner of Cote-Vertu and Marcel-Laurin, waiting at minute 22 for the 121 bus that is advertised at 8 minutes or less.
This is a protected bus lane until 9…so like… where is my bus ?
DeWolf 10:14 on 2025-10-15 Permalink
A key thing about Rabouin’s express bus network proposal is that it wouldn’t just consist of reserved lanes. These would be entirely new bus lines with more limited stops. Combined with the reserved lanes, that would speed up commercial service.
But yeah, better frequencies are essential. That’s very expensive. So we need a clear picture of how STM funding will be increased and/or how its existing funding will be redistributed to improve bus service.
@azhrey The 121 reserved lanes are a joke. They simply don’t exist for most of the route. If you have reserved lanes, they need to exist for the entire length of the line, because otherwise the slightest bit of traffic will cause delays like the one you experienced.