Big announcement mid-Friday about the metro
A big announcement about the Montreal metro is set to happen midday Friday with major reps from all three levels of government present. Any guesses what up?
-
Kate
Reply
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Pages
Other levels of gov’t
Sideblog projects
Enviro Montreal is a Bluesky feed that follows local environment news. Also available on Mastodon.
Archives
Pages rescued from montreal.com
Meta
Daniel D 21:51 on 2022-03-17 Permalink
My wildcard bet is they announce a very sensible extension of the Orange Line from Côte-Vertu to Bois-Franc to connect with the REM.
Faiz imam 22:05 on 2022-03-17 Permalink
I hope that’s the case…
My pessimistic guess is they will announce the blue line is further delayed and the cost is much higher, but the extra is all now paid for by the federal “infrastructure bank”.
mare 23:20 on 2022-03-17 Permalink
Because of the skyrocketing gas prices, all public transport fares will be halved until further notice. New Zealand does it, why can’t we?
The REM Nord from Côte-Vertu to St-Jerome, and later St-Sauveur, will be announced. All above-ground, bundled with highway 13, with new bridges to Laval and Boisbriand-West and linking Mirabel airport, with many stations in the not yet developed areas in between. Building starts end of 2022, opening in 2024.
dhomas 02:18 on 2022-03-18 Permalink
Pablo Rodriguez is the federal MP that will be present. He represents Honoré-Mercier, which covers Eastern parts of the city including Anjou, and some of RDP-P.A.T. Since I have very little expectations for future metro expansion in Montreal, I would guess that they’ll be announcing the breaking of ground for the already announced blue line extension. If I can be a tiny bit optimistic, maybe even a further extension that will make a station/terminus beyond the 25 into Anjou proper.
DeWolf 07:51 on 2022-03-18 Permalink
Le Devoir is reporting that the announcement is related to the blue line, so I expect the announcement will simply be that all the funding is finally in place and construction will finally begin.
Preparatory works have been underway for some time now, expropriations are (mostly?) finished and architects have been hired to design the stations. The only hold-up has been the CAQ’s dithering over budget.
carswell 08:37 on 2022-03-18 Permalink
Many media outlets are saying it’s the final go-ahead for the blue line. Why now? Embarrassment that it’s taken 30+ years? The pending election? Deflecting criticism of the REM de l’Est’s cannibalisation of metro users and budget?
If they were smart, they’d also extend the orange line to Bois-Franc. But they won’t. For some reason, the powers don’t think transit interconnections are important, the RDLE’s failure to reach Central Station being only the latest example.
Kate 09:04 on 2022-03-18 Permalink
CBC radio Friday morning was quite casual about it being a blue line announcement. I’ll post here when the news is out.
DeWolf 09:08 on 2022-03-18 Permalink
@carswell, the Bois-Franc extension is already planned – in fact, it’s considered a high priority by the ARTM and STM. As with the blue line, though, its funding keeps getting put off by the provincial government.
The ARTM and STM are very keen on interconnections – the problem is the CDPQ and its lack of transparency and collaboration with other agencies, as well as the CAQ, which has no interest in listening to the people who are actually in charge of planning transport around Montreal.
REM1 actually has pretty good connectivity, with connections to the orange, green and blue lines. But when the plans were first released in 2016, the transfer stations at McGill and Édouard-Montpetit were only tentative. The Liberals were in charge at the time, so I’d like to know what happened behind the scenes that got the CPDQ to actually commit to building those stations.
carswell 09:35 on 2022-03-18 Permalink
@DeWolf I know (about Bois-Franc) but plans are one thing and reality is another.
The blue line was originally supposed to connect with the West Island commuter rail line and airport train (eyeroll); at least it’s finally going to hook up with the Pie IX bus rapid transit system on the other end, though only years after the BRT opens.
The REM’s connectivity is better than when announced — I still find it hard to believe they’re actually building an Édouard-Montpetit station — but someone travelling from Deux-Montagnes to, say, TAV College or the Bluebonnets site or even the Glenn is going to have a much longer commute than if they could transfer to the orange line at Bois-Francs. And offloading passengers onto the underutilized western orange line would help alleviate overcrowding on what is likely to be one of the busier stretches of the REM line.
Ant6n 13:51 on 2022-03-18 Permalink
On paper the connectivity of rem1 is good – when sufficiently zoomed out. The problem is the design of the stations involving very long transfers. That’s true for virtually all of rem1 stations, the network thinking isn’t particularly optimised.
dhomas 13:58 on 2022-03-18 Permalink
So it’s just a confirmation that the blue line extension is a “go”. They moved the terminus from Galeries d’Anjou to the other side of the 25 onto city land at the Anjou city hall, in order to save on expropriation costs. That doesn’t make much sense, since a) who wants to go to city hall and not the mall; and b) there are many buses that terminate at Galeries d’Anjou, so a metro terminus would have made sense.
You would think the mall would welcome a metro station, with all its additional foot traffic. Then again, it is owned by Ivanhoe Cambridge (aka CDPQ), so they probably don’t want anything but an REM station.
Meanwhile, the old Sears has been sitting empty for years…
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1869986/ligne-bleu-devoilement-budget-metro-montreal
DeWolf 15:56 on 2022-03-18 Permalink
@Ant6n, isn’t that a common problem in many systems around the world, especially with lines built decades apart and/or by different transit agencies? Some of the transfers between the Tokyo metro and JR are very long, or the Paris metro and the RER, not to mention the London underground, which has some very long transfers even though it’s all the same system.
Not saying the transfer from Central Station to Bonaventure won’t be a hassle, but to me, the situation at Édouard-Montpetit and McGill don’t seem all that bad given the constraints.
Ant6n 16:11 on 2022-03-18 Permalink
In Berlin, a station was moved 150 meters when an intersecting line was built. Where there is a will there is a way. The problem in some of the places with bad transfers is that those were competing systems, where transfers were not part of the design at all. Is that the case in Montreal?
I don’t like the idea of citing worse examples, in any case. We should be trying to follow best practices, not congratulate ourselves for being better than the worst. I remember one of the rem people even cited Paris as an example which lacks an integrated main station, so transferring from one intercity train to another (as in VIA from Quebec to Toronto may have one day) would involve a metro trip through the city – of Paris does it, it must be world class!