Montreal’s new rapid transit line saved millions per mile
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I do think this article has a rather unrealistic tone for what the rest of us can learn from this though.
> One advantage is that CDPQ Infra was able to take advantage of existing rights of way to create the route, rather than needing to dig costly tunnels or demolish buildings.
This is huge. In many cities where we most desperately need public transit in the US, this just isn't realistic. We need net new lines either over or underground, and no matter how you slice that they're going to need right of way allowances and NIMBY disagreements. Plus most urban settings that will benefit the most from transit will need tunnel development as part of the cost projections.
> Quebec passed a law that requires municipalities to respond in a timely manner to CDPQ Infra’s requests for permits and other forms of cooperation.
Reading about California's highspeed rail project[^1], it seemed clear that there was deep government buy-in about the end state but the interim goals were over legislated. Counties in the central valley traded their buy-in for the project to starting the line build-out in their counties, even though population centers in LA and SF could have benefited way more from early wins. One thing this article missed was that we need to set more of a precedence for transit agencies / bureaucrats on the ground to make decisions that will further the end goal and circumvent the horse-trading at the legislative level.
[^1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...
By comparison, the Blue line metro extension is being built from scratch, including expropriations, and the projected cost is CAD6.4B for 5-6km of new tunnels and give stations.
Some groups (including envrionment groups bizarrely) objected to the elevated rails, even though these would not split neighbourhoods the way elevated highways did in the 60s throughout north america.
The project was taken away from CDPQ who proved they can deliver transit on time and on budget in both Montreal and Vancouver and given back to STM who have a history of cost overruns. STM immediately proposed running the entire network underground and not running it into downtown, requiring a 2 seat ride onto the green line which is already over-crowded. That explodes estimated costs to $36B CDN from CDPQ's $10B and delivers fewer km of track and less function. What a mess.
I can imagine the same group of people simultaneously demanding better public transport. A mob can want many different conflicting things at the same time.
A new downtown line is fine, but if it means insufficient funding for the already underfunded metro system, it's not clear it would actually be a net benefit.
Ultimately the problem is the legislation around the ARTM having to be able to be long-term profitable, which means that such a project can't make sense.
As far as I'm aware, the ARTM and the city also agreed with a plan where the REM de l'est would connect somewhere onto the green line to avoid competing with downtown metro service, but that was rejected by CDPQ Infra as unprofitable.
The existing right-of-way (sometimes even with tracks still on them!) is turned into bike paths, that nobody uses most of the year because of rain.
They also decided to build a new tunnel under Seattle. What to do with the dirt they dug out? Why, they stuffed it into the old tunnel! Probably the most expensive use of existing infrastructure ever. (The excuse was the old tunnel needed some work to make it more earthquake resistant. All that needed to be done was add a liner.)
It gets even better. They decided to build another tunnel. So they bought a zillion dollar boring machine, and tunneled away. When the tunnel was completed, they cut up the boring machine for scrap! After all, nobody would ever need to build another tunnel.
Since the end of the tunnel was still in the major Seattle metropolitan area, and the machine was already there in place, just keep boring north. But hey, I surely am a dunderhead.
It's so awful one is tempted to characterize it as malicious.
Streetcars are significantly more expensive than BRT, but have at least two substantial advantages: they bring civic interest and investment (streetcar lines are semipermanent fixtures that real estate and communities can develop around), and they physically prevent the kind of petty infringement that personal drivers inflict upon bus riders.
(I live on one of the most heavily used SBS routes in Brooklyn, and I've been disheartened by the blatant disregard trucks and other large cars have for the bus lane and bus parking slots. The stop closely to me is more often than not occupied by a trailer truck, meaning that the SBS bus unloads 50+ directly into traffic.)
If you want to see evidence of this yourself, I'd recommend stopping by the 78th precinct. NYC's finest have many creative examples to offer.
Edit: A recent article on the phenomenon[1]. It's hard to get statistics for this kind of thing, since the NYPD has demonstrated a tactical indifference towards it.
[1]: https://hellgatenyc.com/ghost-car-license-plates-illegal-but...
Am I understanding you correctly that the police staff themselves use illegal or obscured plates on their private vehicles which they park at the police employees parking lot, with no consequences whatsoever? If so this is insane.
Yes[1].
> at the police employees parking lot
Nope, they park illegally on the sidewalk instead[2]. This includes on blocks with public schools[3].
> with no consequences whatsoever? If so this is insane.
Yes, and yes.
Edit: I forgot to mention: documenting any of this comes with a risk of fines or arrest[4]. You will also be ignored if you attempt to report it[5].
[1]: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/02/01/are-police-disciplini...
[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-12/mapping-t...
[3]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ak54k/how-one-brooklyn-neig...
[4]: https://hellgatenyc.com/nypd-try-to-illegally-park-then-tick...
[5]: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/10/25/nypd-ignores-council-...
I’m not aware of a court case that has tried to fight this, probably in part because of procedural challenges (the NYPD spans 5 boroughs with 5 different court systems, standing is unclear, etc.). Unfortunately, the city’s courts probably just aren’t equipped to handle this kind of en masse, “mild” collective punishment by law enforcement itself.
Why is this stated like an unbreakable physical law? They are employees like any other, I'm sure there are ways to incentivize effective job performance.
* When it comes to traffic enforcement, the NYPD has effectively been on a silent strike for the last 3 years.
* It's virtually impossible for the city to assert greater civilian control over the NYPD, in a large part because the NYPD simply ignores any transparency or accountability laws that are meant to reign it in. Punishing them for ignoring the laws is also virtually impossible, because it would require the city's DA's to prosecute the force they currently rely on.
> I'm sure there are ways to incentivize effective job performance.
The best incentive here would be initiating some form of civil liability for the NYPD, or otherwise ensuring that the NYPD cannot rely on the city's general budget to pay for their malfeasance. That's a political non-starter, so maybe just curtailing their overtime.
Longer term, the NYPD needs to lose its special civil service status and require, like every other NYC agency, that its employees live in the city they police. This more than anything else is the most broken incentive around traffic enforcement: the majority of NYC cops live outside of the city and commute by car in[1], meaning that they simply do not care about the basic livability of the neighborhoods they police. This is manifest in the rampant illegal parking and defaced license plates around every NYPD precinct[2].
[1]: https://nypost.com/2023/06/03/more-nypd-officers-are-opting-...
[2]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/nypds-illegal-parkin...
More generally, I think it's weird how we tend to hear more about shortages in all sorts of key industries these days. Medical professionals, police, teachers. Well, it seems it was always true for teachers. But I'm under this impression it used to be easier to have a self-sustaining mix of professions in a geographical area, without trying to regulate it all in place. Maybe this is again all going back to the wealth gap and housing costs.
The issue here is residency and interest: the NYPD is excluded from ordinary civil service requirements, meaning that they aren’t required to live in the city they police. The majority of them choose not to, meaning that the city’s law enforcement is largely made up of people driving their cars into the city and treating as an “outside” place, rather than their home. Forcing them to live in the city wouldn’t fix everything about the NYPD, but I suspect we’d see less petty infringement of traffic laws by the NYPD themselves.
[1]: https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-ben...
(I don't choose the MTA because I think they're a remarkably efficient organization. They just happen to already be gearing up to do it, and are outside the reach of NYC politics, for better or for worse.)
I think that we can reform the NYPD with the right mayor. Eric Adams is obviously Not It. I am not sure there is a single viewpoint he has that justifies the "D" next to his name. Fortunately, it appears he is now tied up in some federal campaign finance investigation that will hopefully end with him not being the mayor anymore. (A few weeks ago, he showed up at the DOT office and ranted about how "more bike lanes isn't going to be my legacy". https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2023/11/01/adams-dismisses-bus-b... He's right. All of his rat violations and campaign finance shenanigans will be his legacy. I would have picked the bike lanes.)
Dedicated bus roads (not just lanes) would do the same thing. Lots of street car systems also share lanes with cars, so I wonder what is even the point of those.
Get in an accident with a bus, and the bus driver has some suspicion on him, people won't immediately blame you. Get in an accident with a tram, and you are just an idiot.
Why? The NYC bus network closely mirrors the old streetcar network, and uses sidewalk dropoffs; there’s no reason why reactivated streetcars couldn’t do the same.
The point about integration with traffic is a reasonable one, but see below the point about civic value: NYC needs less traffic on its streets, and inducing behavior away from driving by taking up that space with a permanent streetcar line doesn’t seem like the worst approach to me.
Cities such as Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Constantine use 7 section Alstom Citadis trams, and there is even a 9 section version. Articulated buses stop at ~3 sections.
Almost double (a Citadis tram can accomodate up to 370, "super articulated" buses like the Citaro CapaCity up to 200) isn't slightly more.
> They aren’t doing many 7 section trams in Bern because much if their routes aren’t completely grade separated
It's not the grade separation that matters, but turn radii and intersection length and distance (basically can such a tram fit in the physical space available).
> I’ve actually never seen a 7 section tram anywhere, including Paris…a new thing
Paris Tram T3(a and b) have been using 7 section trams since the original opening as T3 in 2006. According to Wikipedia there are at least 8 cities with 7 section Citadis, and at least one with 9 sections (Dublin) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom_Citadis . And of course this isn't the only model of modern trams in existance, there's also Bombardier's models (acquired by Alstom), Siemens, Pesa, Solaris, Stadler, etc.
In Germany, the default maximum legal length for a tram running in road traffic (including on dedicated transit lanes [1]) is 75 m. Of course not every tram network goes up to that limit, but at least ~40 m isn't too uncommon, which also approximatively corresponds to the length of a seven-section Citadis (around 43 or 44 m).
[1] Unless all intersections with road traffic are signalized as full-on railway-style level crossings.
Imagine I'll claim all sorts of things: environment, the poor, gentrification, toxic chemicals.
Edit: I read again, and I think you’re trying to point out that there’s a higher true cost. There almost certainly is, and it’s going to be more than similar projects in similar cities. The only really relevant question is whether it’s cheaper than building new subway lines, which it also almost certainly is.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bike-paths-park-ex-m...
For most of the year, due to the cold and snow, the bike lanes are unused and are not convertible to anything else. Sure, some people still bike in the very cold months but that's an extreme minority that inherently includes mostly young, mostly fit cyclists. (Yes European cities also have winters, but they are usually way milder, even in northern cities like Stockholm)
Now, I'm still fully on board of having a walking/biking centric city when it makes sense, so convertible infrastructure would have been amazing. But instead we get half of the roads being unusable for anything during the colder months (look at St-Denis st. for example). Not even for bus transit. Which is to me ridiculous and is again, typical of Montreal's infrastructure projects.
When it gets colder, you just have to dress for the temperature.
Although Montreal is leading the way to sustainable transportation, I don't think Montreal is copying European cities enough. Most of the biking infrastructure around the city is paint on roads making it a patch work system that kids and elderly people can't use safely.
We could've even set a new "standard" for cities that face the same challenges! That way, there's no trade off. We could use it in the winter for bus/priority lanes, and have the very useful and safe bike lanes in the summer. Sure, I don't know of anywhere else that implemented something similar, but that's the point :)
Not Just Bikes covered this..
It's very much the same in my decidedly European country.
Recently I was doing an errand that I knew would be the easiest to do by bike, since my destination was less than 6km away and I have bike lanes/tempo 30 streets all the way up to there. But it was raining, so I decided against that and took an Uber because I don't need this sort of excitement in my life.
And with all that I'm still below average in terms of frequency of choosing to drive.
People, unsurprisingly, don't enjoy the logistics of cycling in inclement weather and they will go as far as to sit in traffic and spend 20 minutes looking for a parking spot instead.
I'm listening to the podcast about Boston's Big Dig (https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig), and one of the things that came up in Episode 6 was cost overruns in the 1990s, particularly on the I-93 segment (burying the highway to replace the elevated highway from the 60s).
The engineers and administrators had no idea what they would be getting into when they drew up the estimate, because no one really knew what was underground when they started digging 100 feet below street level next to Boston harbor and well below the water table. They found everything - old pilings, sewer tunnels from the 1800s, archaic utilities, and mud that was exceptionally sticky. It turned into a series of change orders which greatly increased the $7.7B original price ($10.8B adjusted for inflation) to $14.8B.
TFA mentions the Green Line extension in Boston which has been a costly disaster for different reasons, from ADA compliance to mislaid tracks.
https://www.universalhub.com/2023/companies-built-green-line...
The problem we have in general is that the REM should have been expanded way beyond the Montreal suburbs. All the planning for public transit is controlled by local agencies and no larger integration vision. I have a family member that now has a longer commute because the bus go to the REM instead of straight to downtown Montreal.
It's also super useless if you live a bit further out than the immediate Montreal suburb like I do since you already have to take your car to the highway so it is faster to continue driving on the island vs getting out, finding a parking, waiting for the train, etc.
Personnaly I am very critical of how we handle public transit here vs what I saw can be done in Europe.
Direct bus lines don't scale. As the city grows large enough, you have to replace them with trunk lines. Otherwise there will be too much traffic and too little passenger capacity in the central parts of the city.
With trunk lines, you have to make compromises between speed and service level. Urban light rail moves slowly and stops frequently. Suburban lines are faster and have fewer stops, which allows them to provide a reasonable service over longer distances. Once you go far enough, suburban lines also become too slow, and you have to switch to regional heavy rail with faster trains and even longer distances between stops.
As you get farther away from the city center, the distance between stops on the trunk lines gets longer and the fraction of the area served by the lines gets smaller. If you live in a distant suburb or a satellite town and you are not near a local public transit hub, you can't get good service. Trying to provide it to you would be a waste of money. If you need better transit, you have to choose between driving and moving.
If things look better in Europe and Asia, it's because the people who use public transit have taken the level of service into account when choosing where they live. And every time the transit network changes, there are similar complaints to yours.
If you have a route that has hundreds of thousands of people going in the same direction, true enough. However, America has very few of those routes, even in big cities well-served by transit.
NYC obviously has extremely high density and is very well-served by successful transit. Outside of NY, there aren't many success stories.
The busiest light rail line in San Francisco serves ~60,000 riders/day, and most of the others serve far less. Caltrain serves ~20,000/day. BART serves about 100,000/day on its routes, 400,000 in total. And that's the second most-dense city in the US.
Because of the land use, there is basically nowhere in the United States that can support a viable rail system. There are systems that kind-of-sort-of work -- like SF BART, Portland TriMet, DC WMATA, Boston MBTA, Chicago CTA -- but none of them are very good, and they never will be, nor can they be (excepting maybe CTA), without completely changing the land use in this country.
The problem is that America keeps cargo culting rail systems in areas where there is just zero chance for them to ever be effective, like Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Honolulu, Los Angeles, etc.
I strongly suspect that, although the price-per-kilometer might be lower, the price per traveled-kilometer is literally multiples of that.
I do know in my city-area, price to build, maintain and travel on bike infra, public transport and even dedicated bus infra is far cheaper than the same distances for cars. And that excludes private costs for fuel.
So 4, maybe 6 if you add Atlanta and Seattle (both of which I doubt have a majority share of transit), out of over 300 cities (or equivalent) with 100k+ people.
I live in Cambridge, MA (attached to Boston and sharing one of the top 5 transit systems in the US). We have one car per driver and expect to maintain or exceed that ratio for the next three decades as we can’t afford to spend the increased time needed to do all trips via transit. Or even transit plus ride-share.
That's exactly what needs to be fought. A bit of carrot, a bit of stick
What I mostly see are plans to nerf the utility of the auto, in order to make it competitive with the current utility of public transit.
Me, too. For instance, I'd like to see some modern effort to reduce the effects of the tinnitus-causing screeching of rail cars on the MBTA. For daily commuters who take particular routes, the noise pollution is a serious issue.
For another example, I'm reasonably sure regenerative breaking is not a thing for the light and medium rail, (might be for the silver line) because those systems are old enough designs that efficiency wasn't so much of a concern. Rather, I recall hearing they use big resistor packs to turn speed into heat, and maybe stink up a station when they fail.
Car insurance alone in small city is what ~= 80$/month/driver * 1 million drivers = approximately 1 billion dollars per year.
When people drive less they don’t just use less fuel and save on maintenance etc, but also get into fewer accidents driving down insurance. People also avoid traffic tickets, and cities need fewer traffic cops etc. The city’s air quality improves which reduces respiratory issues saving not just lives but sick days etc. Local property becomes more valuable and congestion shrinks.
The costs comes out of cities budgets, but the savings largely goes to individuals.
That’s probably only 4 cities in the entire US: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston.
Large vs small vs tiny is an arbitrary separation, but Chicago is the 39th largest city in the world. Auston is so far down that list it’s a small city IMO. By comparison Terre Haute, Indiana with 60k people can be called a city, but it’s a tiny city.
However, simply reducing the number of trips makes a significant difference.
I often use public transport, but the downsides can be extremely expensive. The inconvenience of buses often means it is cheaper to use an Uber (only available due to roading network).
It isn't just a path-dependency. Public transport is often unpopular for extremely valid reasons (I personally hate cars and try to use public transport in the limited situations it has any use to me).
Public transport is a nightmare for the disabled and the infirm. Public transport completely and utterly failed after the Christchurch earthquake - bad luck if you needed to rely on it!
Building infrastructure is always an optimization problem and it impacts not just current users but also where people build apartments etc.
1: any successful public transport solution must be be desirable by individuals. The alternative is to force people to use the system - that would not be democratic freedom!
2: any public transport has to be better than what we currently have. Cars are pretty damn good - even though they have downsides they also have some very valuable upside features! Most public transport currently has huge negative problems. It can work in large cities, but buses fail abysmally in my own city (~400000) even though expensive subsidies pay for most of it. Chesterton's fence - we have evolved to cars because they have features that are hard to replicate.
I would like to see an Uber like shared transport on-demand system developed and deployed in my city. I did read about a city (I think in a scandy country) that has a working 24 hour system.
And you could argue that roads are actually even more expensive to invest in because they tend to create a feedback cycle that promotes even more spending on road construction. Because as more people use roads, you need to widen them to increase their carrying capacity, and because road-oriented infrastructure encourages sprawl that pushes people toward choosing driving, and spending more time on the roads, which increases the need for more roads to be built.
A nice case study here is Chicago versus Detroit. Proportionally speaking, they had similar and approximately contemporaneous population growth and loss trends over the 20th century. But that trend didn't cause the same financial catastrophe for Chicago that it did for Detroit, and one argument for why this is is that, since Chicago retained a denser, more public transit oriented urban plan, its infrastructure costs relative to population stayed lower, which in turn meant that it was able to weather a lot more population decline without its economy shrinking too much to be able to affordably maintain its infrastructure, including transportation infrastructure.
In Spain $100m/km gets you a subway.
Of course, the whole concept is moot considering the built form around said subway line needs to be able to support having ridership like that.
Which isn't a fair comparison at all because you are completely ignoring the positive values of vehicles.
I live in Christchurch, with very cheap buses. One destination I need takes me >2 hours by bus that is <15 minutes by car (bus is star network and long waits). Another destination I need has a bus one way once a day only on business days. And I often am carrying more than a backpack can take.
Making lopsided comparisons is just inane.
Star topologies coupled with infrequent service is often what makes public transit suck. It's why I can frequently leave my house later in my car than I'd have to arrive at my destination if coming by public transit. [0]
There's no practical action I can take to "get the problem fixed", because it requires completely re-thinking how my local transit system works [likely to include the transit system spending many 100s of millions more per year on increased service] and, well, I've got a lot of other shit I can actually make progress on in my life rather than shaking a cane at the sky.
If they spent 100x as much public money (our bus service is hugely subsidised and still completely inadequate), a mesh network would still not be able to cover my regular travel needs. Let alone the more complex needs of others.
Possibly we can solve the problem with a shared-Uber system. But there's no way my city government could be trusted to develop that. There are systems that have been developed out there but they are not in my country yet. It's been possible for a decade, so probably another decade away.
Your answer is that I need to wait a decade at a bus stop for a new technology to be deployed in my city.
Meanwhile "Full suspension of NZ Bus services impacting bus users from 2am Friday 14 July; Auckland bus users urged to plan ahead due to driver strike from Monday; Aucklanders urged to plan ahead with train services disrupted and Harbour Bridge closures possible; Auckland's buses are back on track - Bus driver shortage has reduced by 72%"
Fuck that.
There's a reason people spend a shit-ton on cars - because cars have value (they are not just status) and public buses don't work.
While it looks like your bus service is hugely subsidized,it is NOT! Sure the numbers are big, but look at per person in the city and the amount is tiny. If you forcefully took the money everyone spends on cars and put it to transit that would be many orders of magnitude more money than they are getting now. What great transit needs is about what you spend on a car in a month for just insurance and fuel (meaning maintenance and the cost of the car are not included), so if you get rid of a car (not all cars, one car!) you can save a lot of money and that is something your transit system could do in your city if you would invest.
The a bus can go on strike is a problem to work on. You don't allow your electric service to turn off service because of a strike. You don't allow the hospital close because of a strike. (both of them do have unions and go on strike).
> but look at per person in the city and the amount is tiny
In a city of about 400,000 people the per-person taxes that pay for the system are no-fucking-where-near "tiny".
For a grid public network that also works at night the costs would easily be thousands per year per person (I did look up the current figures).
The bus service is virtually unused by the vast majority:
On average, Christchurch residents spend 221 hours a year behind a wheel to just 10 hours on public transport. For Aucklanders, it's 187 hours to 25, and for Wellingtonians, 134 hours to 34.
I know because I try to use buses and this expensive system is usually unavailable to me (my parents place has no service, there is no service at night, I can't carry tools, trailer, zero recreational trips). I have lived without a car for plenty of time (6 months last year) so I know the actual individual costs and benefits.
Other people can't afford the compromises required to use the bus service. If you can afford a car you use one because the public alternatives are shit.
Only a despotic Stalin could force most people to use a public transport system in my city. Perhaps you don't believe in freedom of choice. You wish to tax people to pay for a system they don't want to use. Cars are the long term outcome of people voting with their feet and their wallets.
I understand why public transport is good. But you seem unwilling to listen to why public transport in my city is unusably bad.
> However for most of the trips people make every day a great transit system could exist that we be as good as - or better - than a car trip.
Condescending. Even the best public transport I have used is often a shit experience.
Wave that magic wand again and give us all our own unicorn
And that's not counting all the other costs of automobile infrastructure. Endless parking lots, huge road footprint, 'free' curbside parking...
It's simply stupid to have suburban trains running only every hour/30m
According to the Italian Wikipedia page the cost was of 1.3B € for 13kms.
For a cheaper 100m€/km
While the cost is comparable with Montreal, the Italian one is completely underground.
I wanted to know though, how was the tunnelling done so cheaply? I noticed the lines seemed to follow roads a lot, did they do cut and cover along the roads to keep costs down?
Think of the jobs created. Montreal could stand to learn something.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/24cpr/pdf/AppendixA.pdf , page A-9.
Makes me wonder if the right answer will be dedicated surface roads with a mix of buses and self-driving cars on them. It certainly seems like transit is overpriced by comparison.
For example, in Chicago car ownership has increased as wealthy people move back into the city, and quality of bus service has declined because buses are also stuck in all the congestion that the cars generate. The city has started creating dedicated bus lanes, but they aren't actually improving the situation much because painting the right lane red doesn't actually prevent it from being jammed full of cars waiting to make right turns and double-parked delivery and rideshare vehicles.
Buses are great for roads where there isn't much traffic. However if traffic is bad you have enough demand that a train is better investment.
I am strongly coming to suspect that a lot of the talk about buses being all you need is fueled more by a sort of NIMBYism than by a fully-informed position. Buses are great and good transit systems need more of them than they do trains, but an ideal urban transit system has both.
If you go full libertarian the government should not build roads private rail competes well, but I don't see that happening.
Outside of already very dense cities which heavily discourage using a car (think large asian cities, not montreal), you won't see newly built underground lines built privately. People aren't as captive today and even in the 1900s londons subways weren't very sound financially as companies.
[1]: Transit systems benefit strongly from integration between lines and modes, as well as making interchanges as painless as possible. This is mostly antithetical to multiple companies building lines inside a single city, which often ends up with little fare-integration and annoying interchanges. This can also happen with government built lines, but is less likely.
Unfortunately, this has disadvantages as well:
- lack of enforcement for bus lanes
- needing to share travel lanes with personal cars occasionally, making keeping the timetable harder
- low cost also means no long-term permanency. would you want to invest in transit-oriented development around a platform that could go away anytime?
> They are located in 25 metro stations.
That said, the STM _has_ been installing elevators, and currently 25 stations have elevators, which is a lot more than even a few years ago [0]. Five additional stations are under construction [1].
[0] https://www.stm.info/en/elevatoraccess
[1] https://www.stm.info/en/about/major_projects/major-metro-pro...
Plus you don't need that huge SUV to fit that stroller and awkwardly park it in the entrance of restaurants and so on.
We rarely used a stroller except when our kids were quite young and we were gonna do a lot of walking. Like at the zoo or something. Then, we’d use a cheap little light stroller, not one of those giant monster cargo ones most people have. On-body carriers were better in other cases. And when they could walk, we made them walk, frequently, to get them used to it, carrying less and less over time.
If I went out solo with a young kid, I usually could fit everything I needed for 3-4 hours away in my pockets, easily. We had the usual giant diaper bag with the first kid but rarely used it, and I think we got rid of it before having more kids and didn’t replace it. There was just no need.
IDK what all these parents are carrying around in their cargo-strollers and 20 gallon diaper bags. Kids can travel really light if you’re only gonna be out during the day.
> I too scratched my head when suburbanites brought out their huge strollers from their huge cars/SUVs and essentially lounged at their destinations.
Yeah those are the biggest head-scratchers for sure. People at the friggin’ grocery store or park, which they drove to, with what seems to be several pounds of kid-supplies in huge strollers and bags. Like… you can go back to the car. You probably won’t need to, but if you do, it’s right there. Leave most of that in the car. You don’t need to carry 20 diapers or whatever in the store. One or two will do.
I mean people can do whatever they want, of course, it just seemed like such a weird choice to us. Carrying so much stuff you almost certainly won’t need, so much that you need big, dedicated equipment for it. Seems like hard mode for no reason.
Also strollers are much easier with elevators, but they're not impossible to use with escalators and even can be reasonably lifted for stairs. We've done it plenty. Of course the stroller should be city-sized, not suburban-sized.
Let’s see it built for that price.
https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/the-cost-for-jus...