The Ups and Downs of Montreal’s new Transit Plan

Montreal has released its new 2050 Urban Planning and Mobility plan (only available in French), and I haven’t seen nearly enough talk about it (there has only been a little chatter on Twitter and Mastodon). And so I thought it would be nice to write an article on my thoughts on the plan — where it makes sense, and where it does not.

On the non-transportation front, there is obviously lots to like.

The plan talks about a lot of the same themes we’ve been hearing across the country — more housing near transit, intensification, and amenities within walkable distance. At the same time, I appreciate that the plan makes clear that more substantial intensification makes sense near higher capacity transit modes — something that is far too often not acknowledged.

What’s silly though is that higher amounts of density are suggested near trams than BRT, despite the difference in capacity being small if it exists at all. What is nice is that as part of the plan parking minimums are set to be dropped, which will help with housing costs as well as building the number of people who do not have cars and thus need to walk, cycle, and use public transport.

2040 Plans

The first really interesting diagrams, which can be found here on page 11, show the proposed or “visionary” transit network for 2040 — 16 years from now.

On this map you can see a few things: The Blue Line extension and the REM are totally completed, and the Orange Line’s west leg is extended, not just to Bois France — a very good project which will effectively increase capacity and connectivity for the REM network with only a few hundred meters of new tunnel and a station — but beyond to Laval.

You can also see a very substantial increase in the number of “SRB” or BRT routes, which interconnect quite heavily with one another. This is good of course, but I think not nearly enough attention is given to the fact that if the same approach that was taken for the Pie-IX BRT is taken with these projects, there is simply no way they will be done by 2040. The Pie-IX BRT took years to plan and at least five years to build (some elements are still not done) and is just 13 kilometres long. The amount of new BRT that appears to be planned here is several times that, and I don’t think there is any attempt to grapple with the extremely long timeline and unnecessarily onerous works that happened as part of the city’s first “modern” BRT.

What’s worse than the plans for BRT though are the tramway routes, which appear to total at least 50 – 80 kilometres in length of something Montreal has never built in the modern era.

Included in the planned tramways is the ARTM’s inferior REM de l’Est alternative (that would apparently link to a tramway going downtown — which was disallowed for the REM because of a belief it would cannibalize Green Line ridership). The tram plans (besides the extremely long ones towards the airport and the ARTM line in the east) are not horrible and are similar to other previously proposed routes, replacing busy urban buses with trams. There is also no prioritization showing how the rather large network of lines (including an odd amount on the southwest) would be staged, and not many lines through the fast developing areas around Griffintown and the Peel Basin, which feels like an odd choice.

Fundamentally however, the big problem is that there is no recognition of the reality of the cost (at least in Quebec at present), timelines, and planning problems with the trams. If Quebec City after all of its struggle is barely able to get a neutered tram project for less than several billion dollars, how will Montreal ever be able to build one, much less all of these lines?

2050 Plans

The second outlined plan is for 2050 (page 12), and this highlights what Montreal’s transit network is envisioned to look like in 25 years.

I’d like to remind people that very little has been achieved in terms of Metro or STM driven transit expansion in the last 25 years (since 1999 we’ve only got the 3 stop Laval Orange Line extension). It just feels wrong to even imagine that within 25 years, three metro extensions, a new metro line, and a ton of tram and BRT lines will all be done — far more than in the last 25 years, even with skyrocketing costs. And there appears to be almost no interest on reflecting on this, or expanding on the methods that enabled the low-cost REM project. Instead, all sights and hopes are set on the perennially almost-here tramway, which will surely save the city.

To be more specific, versus 2040, it is assumed that by 2050 there will be yet another big addition to the tram network, with new lines to the north, west, and east of the island, and a few more in the core as well. These lines are probably mostly fine, but they seem needlessly road-oriented, which leads to weird places where you have two lines closely paralleling one another in order to maintain alignment to roadways, while also oddly avoiding connections to say… new REM stations.

At the same time (I could be missing something), it appears that the 2040s are meant to net the city essentially no new BRT, which is odd — if the city is meant to get good at cost-effectively building anything, this is not the way to do it. There are also some obvious gaps that still aren’t plugged (again see above), where there are lots of lines but few connections. It sort of feels like someone wanted to slap lots of lines down, but didn’t go beyond that to ask how they might be used, how the network design would influence the formation… of a network, and how things could be built out in an effective way. It feels unsophisticated.

On the metro side, 2050 is meant to come along with a very useful extension of the Blue Line to Montreal West, which would be a nice follow up to the current Blue Line extension, but which seems unlikely to be built at current prices. Meanwhile, the Pink Line rears its head, but it doesn’t really seem to be adjusted at all from previous plans, even if the enormous number of trams as well as the REM clearly will have an impact as well as open new opportunities.

On the whole, I am disappointed. Montreal has pretty good transit today, but its plans seem to mostly not revolve around the things it does well (metro/REM) and the problems with them (construction cost), and instead focuses on BRT (in a slow and expensive Pie-IX-type orientation instead of a logical Vancouver RapidBus approach), which Montreal has struggled a ton to get built and trams which the city does not have. It doesn’t feel like vision so much as a poorly-informed dream.