The End of the World as We Know It
Won't Be Caused by the REM. (Apologies to Michael Stipe)
In last week’s dispatch, I described my first ride on the first leg of the REM, the Réseau express métropolitain, Montreal’s new automated light metro, which opened to the public on July 29. (Unfortunately, the REM has experienced delays and service interruptions in its first days of operation, meaning that many people who tried leaving their cars at home got to work, school, or appointments late. Not a good look for an agency trying to convince suburban commuters to opt for transit!) This week I want to dig a little deeper into the project, and why it’s so important—not only for Montreal and its suburbs, but for the rest of Canada and, potentially, the United States.
I moved to Montreal from Vancouver in 1997. Since my arrival, the city’s rubber-tired, all-underground, expensive-to-expand, 1960s-vintage métro system has added exactly 3 new stations, bringing the grand total to 68. (During the same period, Shanghai built an entire 408-station subway system—at 802 kilometers the world’s largest by route length—from scratch.)
Slowly and laboriously, the Blue Line, last-to-be-built of the city’s four lines, is being extended to the poorly-served, and lower income, east end of the city. Total cost to add 5 stations to the all-underground Blue Line? $6.9 billion dollars. That’s almost $1.4 billion a station. Which is similar to the (ridiculously high) costs that it’s taking to bring urban rail transit to New York City (I’m looking at you, Second Ave. Subway!) and Toronto, where the 15.6 km Ontario Line of the subway is now set to cost $19 billion, and will be completed—maybe—by 2031.
Guess what it’s going to cost to build the entire REM network, with 26 stations, and 67 kilometers of route? The same as the 5 stations of the Blue Line extension: $6.9 billion. That works out to—let me get out the calculator, tap-a-tap-a-tap-a—$103 million per kilometer. (And those are Canadian dollars!) Versus upwards of one-billion-dollars (US) per km for the Blue Line and the Ontario Line. In other words, the REM is an absolute steal, particularly in the hyper-inflated world of North American urban rail transit construction.
Why is Montreal getting so much transportation for its money? Oddly enough, it’s because a pension fund, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, is behind the whole thing. The Caisse is the enormous investment fund of public sector employee’s pensions; it’s the piggy bank of liquor store employees, bureaucrats, and high school teachers, among many others. (Along with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, it is one of the largest pension plans in the world; in 2022, the Caisse managed assets of $402 billion.) It happens to be independent of the Quebec government, and so not subject to electoral cycles and CAQiste and Liberal pork-barrel politics. (For more on how Quebec’s rural-slanted electoral map distorts transit projects, I recommend the funny and incisive YouTube videos of a Kiwi expat living in Montreal, Paige Saunders.) In other words, its infrastructure building arm, CDPQ Infra, is capable of long-term thinking, network-level planning, and actually getting things done in a reasonable length of time. Little-known fact: the Caisse is the major investor in the widely-appreciated, Skytrain-like Canada Line from downtown Vancouver to that city’s international airport.
When I rode the REM this week, I was impressed. By its speed, the soaring viaducts, the driverless operation, and the design of its stations: they are very modern, a mix of wood and tile, with lots of windows, which will bring in much-needed light on gloomy winter days. Though our mid-century métro has recently replaced much of its fleet—until recently the oldest in operation in North America—with sleek Bombardier-made trains, these Alstom-made REM trains are something else entirely. With their green-and-white livery, they call to mind the trains on Tokyo’s Yamanote Line, and the interiors are roomier than Vancouver’s cramped Skytrain. The Montreal métro’s top speed is 67 km/h (42 mph); the REM’s is 100 km/h (62 miles per hour). This means that it can act like a combination of a metro and a commuter train line, serving farflung stations more efficiently.
When the REM was announced, my attitude, as a transit advocate, was: “Don’t make any sudden moves, people, or you’re going to scare this thing away!” I could see there were some problems with the project—too much of the route was down the middle of highways, which was going to make it hard to build transit-oriented-development near the stations. There were also too many park-n-rides, those vast acreages of parking in the suburbs, for my liking. But I know how hard it is to get rail transit of any kind built on this car-dominated continent, so I bit my lip about the details, and promoted the project on social media as an excellent idea.
And then came the “REM de l’Est.” This was the proposed extension that would have brought the total network to 99 kilometers. It was intended to serve the east and north of the island, including the lower-income neighborhoods of St. Michel and Montréal-Nord, which really need better links to jobs and education downtown. The plan was to run an elevated, Skytrain-like line from a new downtown station, which would be located between the existing Green and Orange métro lines, and then Boulevard René-Lévesque. The latter is a godforsaken, hideous eight-lane urban crypto-highway, a noise-and-air-pollution corridor for cars. The project would have halved the number of car lanes, and put smooth-running electric trains on viaducts that pedestrians could easily walk under. (Nothing like the century-plus-old, clanking elevateds of New York and Chicago, as opponents claimed.) In Vancouver, there are community gardens under similar viaducts, which serve as corridors for wildlife and pollinators. They actually green the city, rather than “tearing it apart.”
Which is exactly what the protesters who ultimately killed the REM de l’Est claimed it was going to do. They also claimed it was going to be horribly noisy. To which I say: get a grip! Also: get out of town—and not just to Florida—and pay a visit to places with similar systems. They are far from noisy.
You know what is noisy? Eight lanes of cars, trucks, and buses. Far more noisy than an electric train. Or the freight trains which run along a route that the Caisse said it would use, in deference to the protesters, to make sure absolutely no NIMBYs lost a minute of sleep.
The REM de l’Est is dead, unfortunately. Who killed it? I hate to say it, but it was Mayor Valérie Plante, and Projet Montréal, a party elected on a pro-transit platform. Maybe they never forgave the REM for replacing their pet project, the Pink Line, a new métro line which never stood a chance of being built, because tunneling underground in a diagonal across the island would have cost dozens and dozens of billions of dollars. But Projet Montréal bowed to the public opposition, withdrew their support, and now the REM de l’Est is destined to become another exhibit in the sprawling North American Museum of Never-Built Transit Lines.
I feel bad. I should have spoken up more when the “protesters” in the east of Montreal were shamelessly borrowing the rhetoric from 1960s anti-freeway demonstrations1 to make sure transit didn’t get anywhere near their car-dependent neighborhoods. The portesters who made sure that low-income, immigrant-rich areas didn’t get a dignified, rapid link to jobs in the center of the city. I was asleep at the wheel, I guess (or rather, preoccupied with meeting the deadline for the book I was working on).
I don’t know how much I could have helped, but I certainly could have called out the short-sightedness of the selfish homeowners who, for fear of change, scuttled an amazingly affordable transit line that would have nourished and served new developments in the de-industrialized East End. Developments where their kids, and grandkids, might actually have had a hope of affording a residence of their own one day. There is a national housing crisis going on, “protesters,” and solving it is a lot more important than your fear of inconvenience and change.
The big hope of CDPQ Infra is that, once people get a chance to appreciate the part of the REM that will be built, they’ll be called upon to build similar systems around the world. They’re already one of the three consortia in the bidding for the High Frequency Rail project planned from Windsor to Quebec City. (If the Caisse does win the bid, it might have a slightly better chance of being completed in my lifetime, or at least my children’s.) The problem is, what makes Quebec unique, the “public-public” partnership between government and a giant pension fund, is looked at askance in most other jurisdictions. As is the fact that the Caisse gets to benefit from the project for 99 years before the REM reverts to the people of Quebec; the standard in other places is closer to 35 years.
One of the pleasures of touring the REM last week was that it gave me the chance to meet the genial Marco Chitti, a transit expert who lectures at McGill and the Université de Montréal. I enjoyed his posts on the site formerly known as Twitter, because his outsider’s eye—Chitti is from Bologna, Italy—brings a wised-up, international gaze to the dysfunctional world of Canadian transit.
Chitti was impressed by the stations, though a little sarcastic: “They’re plain, pleasant, ‘world-class,’ as you say here. Very Canadian and consensual, not upsetting any one. And for sure, the REM is automated, state-of-the-art, one of the most modern systems in North America.” Predictably, he criticized the fact that parts of the REM are built down the middle of major highways. And he gives Vancouver an edge over Montreal for integrating bus loops and other forms of into the station design. Most importantly, though, he questions whether CDPQ Infra will be able to build REM-like systems outside the very special context of Quebec.
“In Italy, it would be illegal for an entity like the Caisse to own public infrastructure for 99 years. They tried in New Zealand, and the New Zealand government showed them the door. I understand why you can do it here, because you can claim that, in the long run, it will end up back in the coffers of Québécois, or at least in their pension fund. It’s like paying yourself money, transferring money from the transit pocket to the pensioner pocket. Governments in Canada like to do this, create big players, ‘les fleurons de l’industrie.’” Chitti doubts whether other jurisdictions will be as enthusiastic to play the game.
We’ll see. For the time being, I’m happy to keep on riding the REM. And I suspect that, once more people here experience it, they’ll be enthusiastic to see what’s next—especially when Montreal finally gets it’s train-to-the-plane.
And I imagine that a good number of soi-disant protesters in the east of Montreal will be kicking themselves for their shortsightedness, even as their neighbors wonder why they allowed themselves to be cheated of what’s starting to look like the transit-deal of-the-century.
Were she alive, Jane Jacobs—a staunch supporter of transit and transit-oriented development—would have been the first to call out the anti-REM demonstraters for hypocricy.