Quebec plans to cut Montreal commuter trains by over 50%, another backward move by the CAQ

Just once, I’d love it if the federal and provincial governments were on the same track.

Though it has since been drowned out by U.S. election coverage, the big news from the waning days of October is that the federal government is apparently interested in developing a high-speed rail corridor between Quebec City and Toronto. 

The government has chosen one of three consortia to build and operate the new rail line, but hasn’t yet awarded the contract. That news is supposed to be announced soon. 

In sum, it’s an upgrade of the “high-frequency rail” they campaigned on back in 2021. Supposedly, the trains will be newly built, fully electric, run on their own dedicated line, reach speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour and also run more frequently than current VIA Rail service.

It’s an upgrade, for sure, but it’s also unambitious. 300 km/hr is a little on the low end of “high-speed” rail. Moreover, the government’s plan to run high speed trains through a number of secondary or tertiary cities between Toronto and Quebec City (like Laval, Peterborough and Trois-Rivières) is going to slow things down a bit. 

While I’m not opposed to any of those cities getting better rail access, high-speed rail (HSR) would be best if it was focused on connecting major cities first and foremost, especially if such a system is imagined as a decarbonization tool, rather than just another means of conveyance. Consider that Montreal-Toronto is the busiest highway and air corridor in the country; if any future HSR service connected these two cities directly (and ideally connected their existing downtown train stations), it would likely significantly reduce air and car traffic. By adding many more cities and stops along the route, I worry they may be trying to do too much all at the same time. There are also murmurings that the Fed may be looking to eliminate regular VIA Rail service from this corridor entirely (thus the additional stops in smaller cities), and this, too, is concerning. Go to any country with well-developed passenger railway service, and you’ll find they run trains at practically every speed, frequency, service class and number of stops. There is no one-size-fits-all solution if the goal is to use trains to get people out of their cars and into a more sustainable mode of transit.

Lastly, while the Fed says these trains are going to run on their own track, it isn’t clear whether it will be a new track, and as you can imagine, there’s not too many places where you can lay down a new, grade-separated railway track in Montreal. If you’ve ever taken HSR in another country, you know that high-speed trains have their own unique infrastructure to ensure safety of operations. For a train to come from Trois-Rivières to Laval, then Montreal and then on to Ottawa, there aren’t many options of existing railways that could be easily repurposed, let alone providing access to downtown Montreal. 

In other words, we may get high speed rail, but if the trains are running in and out of Gare Centrale, then they’ll likely be using someone’s else’s track and have to reduce their speeds within the city. That isn’t uncommon, but given that both Gare Centrale and Windsor Station are terminal stations serving multiple other train lines, this could add a substantial delay. How either of these stations would also provide access to Laval isn’t clear either. Alternatively, a new station is built somewhere else entirely, but I can’t imagine such an option would be too popular with travelers. I fear we’re about to discover how big a mistake it was to turn the Mount Royal Tunnel over exclusively to the REM, but I digress.

While the Fed is nonetheless pushing forward on a long-standing promise to develop and enhance rail service, the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM) — the Quebec government’s transit planning agency for Greater Montreal — is thinking about eliminating three “underperforming” commuter rail lines and replacing them with bus service.

That’s right: In 2024, a Quebec government agency is looking to cut the number of commuter rail lines serving the province’s biggest city — by more than half.

That such an idea would even be considered is indicative of broader problems of perspective regarding public transit that bedevil our society. While other countries fund public transit adequately to ensure their populations can easily get around without the need for cars, Quebec often feels uniquely interested in building transit infrastructure without ever really thinking too hard about operations, quality of service or whether the “investment” in transit is ever actually going to pay off.

The REM, as an example, was a “success” for the CDPQ and the politicians who supported it, in that part of it was built and the photo ops were staged. Whether it runs on time or ever gets completed is a headache for the next sucker who happens to be in power at the time. 

Commenting on this issue in The Gazette, Allison Hanes argues that the blame rests solely with the CAQ, which has consistently underfunded transit agencies operating in Montreal. Hanes further argues that the ARTM’s proposal to chop Exo commuter rail service may be a way to exert pressure on the Legault government to get it to pony up the dough. It’s certainly an interesting theory, and I genuinely wish this to be the case, but I have my doubts. It may simply be arithmetic, a bean counter’s ‘rock and a hard place’ solution to declining ridership that doesn’t take into account the root cause of the decline (namely previous cutbacks and a failure to adapt transit to evolving needs).

You might be wondering why this would matter to you — not too many Cult MTL readers live out in the exurbs. That’s also part of the problem — the commuter rail network has been geared almost exclusively to the needs of weekday office workers for much of its life, and this may need to change in order to make the rail network more useful in the long term. 

The crucial issue is that the commuter rail network is an invaluable tool in the fight against climate change: more people taking the train means fewer cars on the road. That means less emissions, less pollution, and less congestion, and by extension, a reduction in global warming, lower overall healthcare costs, lower road, highway and bridge maintenance costs, and less lost productivity due to traffic gridlock.

But you have to take the broad view of things to recognize this, and politicians can rarely see further than the next election.

What exactly are they planning?

As reported by Radio-Canada, an internal ARTM document proposes axing regular service on the Mascouche, Candiac and Mont-Saint-Hilaire lines entirely. For the Vaudreuil-Hudson and Saint-Jérôme lines, train service may skip certain “underused” stations. For two of the cancelled train lines — Candiac and Mascouche — the ARTM document proposes that bus service instead bring commuters to the Brossard REM station and the Radisson metro station, respectively.

Why is this shortsighted?

For starters, this proposal is a big step backwards, not only for public transit in the Greater Montreal area, but for the quality of life of people living throughout southwestern Quebec. 

Over the last quarter-century, the commuter rail network serving Montreal has grown steadily, both in terms of the number of lines and the number of passengers carried annually. Most of the lines were extended farther afield during this time, and the system expanded from three lines in the mid-1990s to six lines by 2020. (It appears as though only the Vaudreuil-Hudson line, which used to run all the way to Rigaud, contracted during this time, and that was only by a single station. The decision to do so was chiefly because Rigaud didn’t want to continue paying its service fees). 

To suddenly propose fully eliminating train service on three of those lines, and reducing service on another two, seems like an extreme measure when the commuter rail network has only otherwise ever known growth and expansion. 

The ARTM’s argument, that these lines have lost more than half their annual ridership since the start of the pandemic, isn’t sufficient justification to cut service so dramatically (or even at all). Historically, the trend has been one of growth, and there’s no reason not to think a return to normality isn’t in our future. If anything, the consequences of the pandemic and the ‘work from home’ trend ought to be changes to how commuter rail is conceptualized, organized and sold to the public. Perhaps it’s fewer trains at rush hour but more service throughout the day. Maybe it’s more service nights and weekends to ensure Montreal remains accessible to suburbanites outside of weekly work hours. Or perhaps it’s more incentives that are needed to get commuters back onto trains, like free wifi. 

There’s a point of commonality between the ARTM’s plans to reduce service and the Fed’s HSR proposal: both are really limited to how trains are currently being used, rather than thinking about how they might best be used as an evolving transit solution and decarbonization tool. The Fed’s HSR route proposal is clearly designed to hit every major population centre between Quebec City and Toronto, likely to guarantee a high number of potential users, even though adding so many cities will likely cut into the speed of the service. It seems overly motivated by existing constraints, not future considerations.

Either way, solving the problem of low ARTM ridership cannot allow for the possibility of eliminating train service altogether. We’re living in the era of the climate crisis, so no level of government or government agency should be seriously considering any reductions to public transit service or capacity. Remarkably, the ARTM’s proposal actually does both — less service, less often, to fewer places — and replacing high passenger-volume commuter trains with lower-volume buses. 

The other issue that merits consideration is the effect that bussing commuters to REM or metro stations may have on those systems, to say nothing of commuting in general. One of the main benefits of the commuter rail system we have is that it puts bedroom suburbs in direct connection with the city centre. It is far less practical and convenient to now suggest those commuters should have to transfer onto other already well-used transit systems to reach their final destination. As the shut-down of the Deux-Montagnes Line has already demonstrated, many of those commuters wound up taking their cars rather than taking replacement buses. In addition, when the Mascouche Line was cut off from the Mount Royal Tunnel (adding another hour or so to that commute), its ridership dropped off.

None of this is conducive to increasing ridership, nor the public’s faith in public transit.

Why is this actually a waste of money?

The ARTM says they are facing a $21-million per annum budget shortfall due to fewer commuters, with charts indicating a drop from just over 13 million users in 2019 to 3.6 million in 2020. But the pandemic wasn’t the only cause of the ARTM’s loss in revenue in 2020 — it also lost the Deux-Montagnes Line that same year to make room for the REM. This is a scandal in and of itself. Prior to the pandemic, the Deux-Montagnes Line was carrying about 7.3 million passengers per annum, by far the most used of all six lines. This lost income was never replaced, even though it may have been supporting the rest of the network.

The ARTM’s charts also show that use of all Exo commuter rail lines is increasing from the drop in 2020–2021. Use has increased from 2.5 to 6.1 million per year between 2021 and 2023. According to The Gazette, 1.8 million passengers traveled on Exo trains in the first quarter of 2024, an increase of 23% over the previous year. If that trend continues, the Exo network will re-attain its pre-Covid per annum usage levels by the end of this decade, perhaps sooner. However much the ARTM’s annual deficit, the cost of eliminating and then potentially re-starting commuter rail service five or six years down the line would likely be far greater.

Rethinking our relationship with rail

A century ago, Montrealers could get on trains from about a half-dozen train stations located in and around the city and go just about anywhere. Most major cities in North America were like this up until the 1960s. The commuter rail network we have today, however impressive it is by comparison with other North American cities, still pales in comparison to what was once considered a bare minimum level of service.

There’s an opportunity for reinvention here, but the debate shouldn’t focus on whether or not we get to keep the existing commuter rail network, but whether that infrastructure might be used for a potentially larger railway network connecting Montreal with more of the rest of the province. Montreal and Quebec should be working together to develop a provincial railway system, our own Quebec VIA. We should be expanding service in parallel with federal HSR proposals, rather than retreating while they’re advancing.
Perhaps the argument in favour of greater rail service should be cultural, rather than practical, economical or environmental (or all of those things together). If Montreal was no more than a single, direct, train ride away from les régions, would that not encourage greater cultural exchange between the various distinct parts of Quebec and its metropolis? Would it also not ensure more Québécois coming to Montreal, in turn speaking far more French in downtown Montreal? ■

The original version of this article was published in the Oct. 2024 issue of Cult MTL.

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Read more editorials by Taylor C. Noakes.