On a sunny morning this November, I boarded the Réseau Express Métropolitain, Montreal's brand-new light metro line, for its first voyage. From the front of the driverless train, the crowd got a privileged view of the rough rock walls of the century-old tunnel under Mont-Royal and the ice-rimed shores of the Rivière-des-Prairies. The journey was not just a tour of the REM's 14 new stations, however -- it was a preview of the most ambitious transit expansion in North America.
The last time Montreal celebrated the opening of a new rapid transit line, the Expos were still running the bases at Olympic Stadium, and Mitsou was tearing up the pop charts with "Bye bye mon cowboy." Since the inauguration of the Montreal Metro's Blue Line in 1988, the city's network has added just three stations. Now, the opening of the REM has vaulted Canada's second largest city from a transportation laggard to a frontrunner. It's also provided a low-cost template of quick-to-build rapid transit that every Canadian city struggling with gridlock, long commutes and inflated transit costs can, and should, emulate. Next spring, a new branch will open to the island's western suburbs, and another is slated to reach Trudeau airport in 2027. By that point the REM will span 26 stations and 67 kilometres -- it's an expansion that invites comparison to the long-awaited Grand Paris Express, four new lines of automated trains that will serve Paris's outer suburbs by 2030.
Riding that train made me feel like Canada was finally building transit fit for the 21st century, a worthy counterpart to the systems that are now common in Asian and European cities. This is a sharp contrast to the rest of the country. For the most part, Canada's cities are lacking the kind of transit networks people now take for granted in much of the world. Toronto has struggled for years to finish the Eglinton Crosstown, a light-rail project that is now going into its 15th year of construction. The Ontario Line, the successor to the Downtown Relief Line -- a project first proposed in the 1980s -- won't be completed until 2031. And while second-tier cities in China have metro systems, smaller Canadian cities like Halifax, Saskatoon and Winnipeg struggle even to set up express bus lanes.
The REM has taken best practices from around the world and gives them a made-in-Canada twist. As in Shanghai and Taipei, you board the trains through safety-enhancing platform doors. Like most modern European networks, the trains draw power from overhead wires; this being Montreal, the rooftop pantographs that connect to the wires are reinforced to break up ice on the lines. As on Japanese commuter trains, the seats are heated for winter riding comfort. And because it's automated, it can run trains at greater frequencies -- they can arrive as often as every two and a half minutes.
Maybe most importantly, given Canada's cash-strapped municipal budgets, the REM is being built for a fraction of the cost of comparable projects in North America. In Toronto, the Eglinton Crosstown has swollen to $13 billion, or $684 million a kilometre. The second phase of New York's long-overdue Second Avenue Subway may cost $3.7 billion a kilometre, and current rail expansions in San Francisco and Los Angeles have gone north of $1 billion a kilometre. The construction of a five-station extension to the all-underground Blue Line, which has just begun in Montreal's east end, has a similar price tag. The REM is being built for $140 million a kilometre -- an astonishing bargain.
How is Quebec getting so much bang for its transportation buck? Typically, governments finance existing transit agencies, giving them the licence to build and operate new lines for 30 years or so. The city of Montreal ponied up $100 million to fund the stations that connect to its metro, but this isn't a municipal project. The REM is being built by CDPQ Infra, the construction arm of the Caisse de dépôt et placement, the manager of Quebec's massive public pension fund, which has undertaken other infrastructure projects: Eurostar's high-speed trains, the terminals at Heathrow airport and Vancouver's Canada Line. CDPQ Infra has a 78 per cent equity stake in the REM and will reap revenue from the service, paid out at the rate of 75 cents per kilometre per passenger, for 99 years. From the start, it was in CDPQ's interests to keep costs down.
It did that in part by building an elevated system, which is much cheaper than tunnelling. But it also standardized design. Historically, Canadian cities seem to reinvent the wheel every time they embark on a new transit project. That's fun for someone like me, who enjoys a little local colour when he travels, but it doesn't make a lot of sense if your goal is to get a lot of transit built quickly. China has constructed 11,000 kilometres of urban rail transit in the last two decades in four dozen cities. It's done this quickly and cheaply by standardizing station and network design and mass-producing metro trains. Whether you're in Chengdu or Guangzhou, you ride one of five standard train designs. And because lines are nationally planned and engineered, a Chinese city contemplating a new transit system doesn't need to start from scratch -- they just choose from existing templates that match their particular needs.
Standardizing mass transit doesn't mean skimping on quality. The REM stations are less varied than their mid-century counterparts in the Montreal metro, many adorned with Quebecois artwork. But they're attractive nonetheless -- they use light-hued wood, sourced in Quebec, and vast walls of glass to convey a sense of transparency. The fact that the REM used a standardized station design allowed for economies of scale and suggests a way forward for other Canadian cities.
CPDQ also chose the path of least resistance when selecting a route, taking advantage of existing infrastructure and rights of way. One set of tracks was laid over the existing Champlain Bridge, which was completed six years ago with a central deck to accommodate a future transit corridor. Then more tracks were laid down the centre of a major highway. The route I rode at the inauguration takes advantage of the Mont-Royal Tunnel -- at five kilometres the third-longest tunnel in Canada -- as well as a historic rail right of way to Deux Montagnes. The REM was spared the expense of tunnelling, bridge-building and expropriating trackside properties.
Not all cities have such an abundance of favourable alignments. But there are plenty of railways, hydro-electric corridors and highways to work with. A REM-style system could take advantage of the existing rail corridor that passes by Calgary's airport to supplement the existing CTrain light rail system. In Ottawa, something like it could replace Line 2 of the O-Train. One could link Quebec City to Lévis under the St. Lawrence River. Smaller cities entirely lacking in rail transit, among them Halifax, Saskatoon and Winnipeg, could look to light metros like the REM as a budget-minded alternative to cost-prohibitive heavy rail.
The system has had growing pains. The first phase of the REM was plagued by technical issues, which left passengers stranded for hours in the middle of the Champlain Bridge or lining up for replacement shuttle buses. On board the train, I talked to Loïc Cordelle, director of the system's contract operator, who explained that the breakdowns arose when points on the tracks froze in sub-zero weather, an issue he believes has been resolved by a new gas-powered system to heat the switches.
But these kinks will be worked out. Thanks to the REM, a lot of engineering, design, and planning expertise is now assembled in Montreal. A country serious about meeting its climate commitments, as Canada claims to be, needs to take advantage of this expertise. Through the economies of scale brought on by standardization, CDPQ Infra is delivering rapid transit for a cost that is a degree of magnitude lower than what other North American systems are paying. The REM is already transforming life for Montrealers. It's time for a serious conversation about what it could do for Canadians in other cities.
Taras Grescoe is the author of Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, and writes about trains, transit, bicycles, and cities at www.highspeed.blog.