Metro interruptions rose in 2024
Interruptions of metro service rose in 2024 as more people returned to their work commute. Half the problems are caused by passengers, which explains why the statistics are linked.
24heures looks into why Berri-UQÀM station is always under repairs.
Taylor 21:11 on 2025-01-27 Permalink
Having recently visited Japan, I think we’d likely save a lot of money, have cleaner stations, and have far fewer service interruptions, if only we had uniformed transit employees – not police – on the platforms, keeping an eye on things
Treat people like trash, they’ll treat their environment like trash. And STM pigs treat everyone like trash.
Kate 22:04 on 2025-01-27 Permalink
I wonder if that system would work here. Do we have the same quiet respect for authority as the Japanese?
GC 23:05 on 2025-01-27 Permalink
When I was in Japan, someone told me that basically no one jay walks–except in Osaka. I did not actually get to visit Osaka, but I was amazed at how people respected traffic signals everywhere that I did visit.
Taylor 23:06 on 2025-01-27 Permalink
I’ve wondered if it’s purely a matter of cultural difference. The way people talk about ‘the old days’ I think North Americans, Canadians in particular, were fairly deferential to authority.
I think there’s a relationship to neoliberal economic policies that severely underfunded the social welfare state and ultimately stripped cities of much of the money they needed to provide basic big city services. If the gov’t constantly underfunds or defunds its cities, it sends a consistent message it doesn’t value cities or their citizens. How are people supposed to react to that?
It occurred to me, riding the Tokyo subway, and then thinking about the New York subway, that it was the Americans who won the war… and yet in the richest and most powerful city on Earth, in all of history, their subway is grim, grimy, an embarassment. Tokyo’s subway stations not only have washrooms, they’re spotless too. There aren’t any refuse bins, and yet there’s no trash anywhere because people carry it out with them. Montreal’s Metro is unfrotunately inching closer to NYC than Tokyo, and that’s movement in the wrong direction.
Also – how is it that they spent $6 billion on the REM and none of the REM stations have toilets? How backwards are we?
Nicholas 00:38 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
Taylor, employing a person to stand on each platform for every hour a station is open at $20/hr (including benefits, which is way too low) comes to $20 million a year. Platform screen doors, which the STM cancelled due to lack of funds, would cost around $1 billion. So for 50x the yearly cost you vastly reduce train delays due to blocked doors, eliminate them from people on the tracks, stop about 16 people a year from jumping in front of trains and speed up trains as they can enter the station faster. You don’t do anything for trash on the platforms, but vastly reduce it on the tracks (plus accidentally dropped items). You could of course reduce the hours or coverage, but PSDs are just going to be a much better deal. In fact, if you just took the value of the lives saved you’d pay for the doors in half a decade; add the value in better train service it’s a no-brainer.
Kate 11:12 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
There are public bathrooms on the platform at Parc Jean‑Drapeau station, left over from its early days during Expo 67. They’ve been locked up since that time. A public transit bathroom would inevitably become a drug dealing and ingesting hotspot, and probably used for practices even less salubrious. You couldn’t pay anyone enough to keep a public transit bathroom clean.
Daisy 12:31 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
They could be paid washrooms like in some places in Europe.
walkerp 13:11 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
The new york subway is “grim, grimy, an embarrasment”?! Have you ever actually used it in the 21st century or is this characterization based on a viewing of The Warriors?
Meezly 13:42 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
I WFH and commute to work a few times a year. The ONE time I had to go to the office last Friday, the metro service was temporarily halted due to a “medical emergency” going home during rush hour. Fortunately I only had one stop so I got out and walked to my bus stop (if the downtown bus routes weren’t so fragmented, I wouldn’t need to connect but that’s another story).
I had wondered how often these interruptions occur, and now I know… too frequently!
CE 14:39 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
I have ridden the NYC subway many times in the last few years and I would absolutely describe it as grim, grimy, an embarrassment. Especially when comparing it to almost any other large public transit system in the world.
DeWolf 15:00 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
Yeah, the New York subway is gross. It works insofar as it has a huge reach and it generally gets you where you want to go, but the frequency is not great (the metro runs more often than most NYC lines), the stations are dirty and it’s generally not a very pleasant experience.
The brilliance of Tokyo’s trains has a lot to do with the simple fact that Japan has always invested heavily in rail transit, even while being a major auto manufacturer with no shortage of car-oriented infrastructure. But there’s also land use, which means that even if most of Tokyo consists of single-family houses and small-scale apartment buildings, the built environment is very dense and oriented around the railways, many of which are run by private companies that have built an entire infrastructure around them, including department stores, shopping centres and housing developments.
Public washrooms are standard in most Asian metro systems and their ubiquity and cleanliness really comes down to the willingness to invest in them as a public resource. The washrooms at Eaton Centre, Place Ville-Marie and the Complexe Desjardins aren’t disgusting or used for drug dealing. The only reason metro station washrooms would be is because the STM couldn’t afford to pay enough people to monitor and clean them.
Taylor 15:51 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
I agree 100% with DeWolf.
I think the issue here isn’t about how “different” Asian society is from our own, but how different our (apparent) values are from the global norm. Because it’s not just Asian cities that have clean and orderly subways and public washrooms. From what I’ve seen, the European average is higher than our own as well in these regards.
Their mentality seems to be oriented on what is an acceptable minimum for basic human dignity, and that minimum seems to be “clean, efficient public transit for all, at an affordable cost, with ample services and staff, as well as clean public restrooms you’re not terrified of using.”
Our North American mentality seems to be “how dare you ask for anything more than the absolute minimum for what is required for our society to function.”
And to Nicholas’ point, I would say paying for platform level STM employees to prevent suicides and, more often, simply keeping things running smoothly, would be worth literally whatever cost.
What we seem to not comprehend is that minimal investments in improving the quality of the experience result in increases in usership, which in turn pay for the increased operating costs. The avg Tokyo metro car seemed much older than the avg Montreal metro car, but they were spotless, and the train conductors and platform staff made sure they ran on time and without incident. I’d trade the new trains for that level of service any day of the week.
Joey 15:54 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
The hot new open-source Chinese AI says that Tokyo’s population density is 2,773 people/km². Ours is ~934 people/km². If our density tripled, we would have no choice but to massively expand our transit options. This isn’t the whole story, but it’s a pretty necessary factor, no?
Joey 16:51 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
@Taylor all that may be true, but a more apt comparison would be to a city of similar size and density as Montreal (Nagoya? Kobe? Osaka). Comparing us to global megacities like Tokyo, New York, Mexico City, etc., is less instructive than comparing us to cities that have similar demographics and geography, no?
I don’t disagree that values, priorities and the political economy context in Japan is very different from Montreal – but if you tried to imagine a Montreal-style approach to urban transit in Tokyo, i.e., one whereby there are way more cars and way fewer public transit options, you would quit before you started because the notion is just absurd. What our civic leaders failed to grasp decades ago is that you can’t rely on a big population to demand a high-capacity transit system; you need a robust transit offering to enable population growth (or, as in the parts of the US that are currently growing, you need to embrace sprawl at all costs). The end-result is that every mode of getting around, whether it’s driving, cycling, walking or riding transit, is almost good enough but not really good (though parts of Montreal are getting close with cycling), which breeds annoyance among citizens, which makes the kind of collective action needed to cultivate better communal transit development (which Japan seems to have in spades) impossible.
Put it another way: if Berri-Uqam had public bathrooms, would you use them?
Taylor 20:45 on 2025-01-28 Permalink
@Joey
A few things:
1. I recently visited Kyoto as well, which has a population closer to that of Montreal (albeit, just within the city limits – the tax base supporting the STM is larger than the city’s population but I digress). In any event, transit in Kyoto was definitely on par with Tokyo in terms of quality, service level, cleanliness, etc. Ditto the public washrooms, parks, public spaces etc., just on a smaller scale.
2. To your earlier point, no, population density does not have to be the deciding factor in public transit quality, let alone reach, service level, clenliness, (etc). There are plenty of cities and countries all over the world with lower populations and population densities that provide better levels of service than is typical for North American public transit.
3. Size has nothing to do with a city’s pride and what it decides is the minimum standard quality of life it hopes to offer its citizens. The city of Paris is only about 100,000 people more populous than the city of Montreal, occupies about a quarter of the land, is essnetially one gigantic heritage/archeological site, and still manages to have a vastly superior public transit system that costs then far less to build, maintain, and operate. They’re simply making choices we’re not and won’t tolerate what we do. These are learned behaviours, nothing more.
4. Montreal should *absolutely* be constantly aiming to make sure it is in the same league as the global supercities, even if we never even appraoch the same population. Never listen to anyone who says “don’t aim so high”. If a city’s administration isn’t constantly seeking to improve, expand, and enhance it doesn’t belong in office. Cities elsewhere aren’t aiming for the floor, that’s a profoundly North American defect, likely the consequence of 50+ years of structural disinvestment. North American cities were not like this before the mid-1970s, for the most part.
5. I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make in your big paragrpah, but a few notes: a) our political leaders were absolutely counting on contrinued population growth in Montreal to fuel the need for an ever-expanding Metro system; b) the switch from building Metro to acquiring and developing the commuter rail network was an appropriate adaptation to the realities of suburbanization in the region of Greater Montreal (and the REM should never have been designed to replace Exo, that was a mistake that will haunt us); c) for economic and environmental reasons, sprawl absolutely cannot be embraced at all costs, moreover, the global majority of cities do not embrace sprawl, but instead, densification; d) not at all, some modes are not only vastly superior to others, their benefits are routinely studied and validated. No urban planner aiming to improve the fortunes of an urban commercial thoroughfare would encourage more cars or parking, and the reason why is because, simply, drivers are shite shoppers; f) the vast majority of world cities are making major investments in pedestrianization and public transit. Paris is an excellent exmaple. It’s a foolish municipal govt that listens to the whining of a priviledged minority, yet this appears to be the North American standard.
6. If said WCs were maintained at a level that respects basic human dignity, were cleaned regularly, and it was a point of pride for the STM to show its users clean WCs as a symbol of their commitment to the public, yes, why not?