Comment by Sytten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sytten | Hacker News Reader

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The article is way too rosy. Sure it didn't cost much but it also uses a shit rail technology IMO that is very noisy. Go ask the residents that live near it if they find that nice. They had so many complaints recently that they had to do urgent work to mitigate.

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.

That's just the way public transit works.

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.

> Direct bus lines don't scale. As the city grows large enough, you have to replace them with trunk lines.

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 don't know enough about it to weigh in on the economics (though I live in Montreal and this is the first good press I've seen so I'd take it with a grain of salt). But noise-wise, I was really surprised at how loud it is. I don't live along the route but I run along the Lachine Canal and and I don't know if it's because it's elevated but it is way louder than you'd expect for what looks like a small train going by and jarring in an otherwise very quiet area.

The REM makes a lot more sense if you think of it as a way to funnel money from the local and provincial governments to the CDPQ.

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