Many wouldn’t have bet $20 on it last May, and I was one, but the four-headed dragon that has taken over the REM de l’Est has done a terrific job over the past nine months.
Posted at 6:00 am
For those who might have spent the last year under a rock, this automated light rail project was first proposed in 2020 by a subsidiary of the Caisse de depot to connect downtown Montreal to the east and northeast of the island.
Planned largely on aircrete structures, the 32-kilometer network has sparked a lot of controversy in several neighborhoods. Given its apparent lack of “social acceptance”, the Legault government withdrew the project from the Caisse to entrust it to the public sector.
Get ready for an avalanche of acronyms here.
A group consisting of the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM), the Société de transport de Montréal (STM), the Ministère des Transports du Québec (MTQ) and the City of Montreal took over the file in May 2022.
This quartet doesn’t immediately smack of efficiency, but the progress report they’ll deliver later this week suggests addressing some of the biggest irritations that plagued the original project.
Basically, according to several of my sources, the group is proposing to make more connections with the already existing transport network.
These include a connection or two with the green line of the metro, another with the blue line and another possible with the Train de l’Est at the current Saint-Léonard-Montréal-Nord station on the corner of Boulevard Lacordaire.
In short, the idea would be to rely more on the infrastructures already in place, rather than creating a parallel network.
Focus on complementarity rather than competition.
The task force also considers an increase in green line capacity in its analysis. There are also plans to expand service offerings on the exo-operated east train, whose survival seemed threatened by the original version of the project.
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Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault confirmed on Monday that the most problematic part of the Mercier-Est route will no longer be built on airy concrete structures.
IMAGE SUPPLIED BY REGIONAL METROPOLITAN TRANSPORT AUTHORITY
A map of the “reference” version of the new version of the REM de l’Est published by the ARTM in autumn 2022. The various scenarios considered, including the extensions to Rivière-des-Prairies, Laval and Lanaudière, do not appear there.
For the central section, two tunnel options of approximately 8 kilometers in length are being studied, such as the one that crosses the residential areas around the 25 freeway from east to west. One of the scenarios envisages crossing under the Hochelaga road with a connection to the Assomption station on the green line. The other would run under Sherbrooke Street East, with a second link at Honoré-Beaugrand station.
The easternmost portion of the route, in the more industrial Montreal East sector, is still planned on an aerial structure. The “northern” branch of the project, which runs roughly under Boulevard Lacordaire, has been and will be planned to be underground.
One of the promising proposals of the new version is the proposed extension of this branch to Rivière-des-Prairies, to Cégep Marie-Victorin, in the north-east of the island. The addition of two stations in this neighborhood would increase ridership by 20%, according to current projections, which is significant.
Extensions to Lanaudière (to either Repentigny or Mascouche) and to Laval are also being explored, at the request of the Legault government. However, these extensions are still in a very embryonic stage and require detailed analysis.
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Now the question on everyone’s lips is: How much can this miracle cost?
The answer: We have absolutely no idea.
The first version presented by the Caisse, which included a direct link to downtown but did not target Laval or Lanaudière, was valued at $10 billion.
The Quebec-commissioned task force to relaunch Eastern REM—now dubbed the “Structuring Project of the East”—still has a mountain of work ahead of it.
He will have to analyze the soils in Mercier-Est, where the cost of digging a tunnel will undoubtedly be in the billions. Also examine the many technical obstacles – like crossing the Rivière des Prairies – that an extension into the suburbs would entail.
The amount could be astronomical, even if the portion facing downtown was abandoned. It is also necessary to check whether the expected volume of traffic – around 19,000 passengers at peak times for the 23-kilometer basic project – justifies the calculation.
The expected reduction in travel time for future users of less than ten minutes on average compared to the current situation may also appear to be quite small given the billions in cost of the project.
The group predicts a ‘modal switch’ of 19% of users, the proportion of people who would leave their car to board the new light rail system. That’s more than the 17% envisaged in the Caisse’s version, but we’ll have to see what methodology was used.
The governance of the project must also be clarified and is even crucial for success. According to my information, who will take on the role of conductor between the ARTM, the STM, the MTQ or the city has not yet been decided at this point in time. It will require a clear command line, which hasn’t always been obvious on Montreal’s public transit system for the last few years.
It is reassuring that everyone can row in the same direction. We saw it in 2021 at the latest, when the Legault government set up a special committee that managed to siphon more than a billion off the galloping bill for extending the blue line in a matter of months. It’s essentially the same group working on the East project.
Quebec, the lead financier, will ultimately decide the fate of the project when a preliminary cost analysis is presented.
The number of zeros at the end of the calculation proves everything.