In 2011, Seattle voters elected to build a multibillion-dollar tunnel to replace the defunct, crumbling Alaskan Way viaduct. Now 75% complete, this same tunnel was expected to be completed over a year ago. Hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns and many elemental geology lessons later, the project’s path to completion finally seems a little less tumultuous.
Transportation megaprojects such as these seem to be a growing trend of late; the Second Avenue Subway and Measure M, in New York and Los Angeles, respectively, come to mind. These massive investments have a lot in common. Roughly defined as billion-dollar-plus public works projects of any kind, megaprojects often offer almost utopian views of a city’s future. Their vast scale is many times reminiscent of a cinematic man-versus-nature narrative[1], and they often serve to boost the resumes of the politicians responsible for their creation.
Enter Montreal’s Réseau Électrique Métropolitain (REM), a project that amply satisfies all of the above criteria. Estimated to cost more than five billion dollars, the light-rail-hybrid aims to connect communities as far west as Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and as far south as Brossard. Yet ever since the opening wave of optimism, red flags are rising quicker than the project’s leaders can hide them in the rush to get construction underway. Doubt from experts, bloggers, and the general public alike is increasingly prevalent.
The project’s strong support from Montreal mayor Denis Coderre comes as no surprise. The list of vast, legacy-bolstering undertakings he has overseen is large, and the city’s inescapable construction haze would readily prove this. Reconstruction of two major highway sections, Turcot and Bonaventure, as well as massive, city-wide works to celebrate Montreal’s 375th anniversary are a few examples.
Somewhere in the sexy, grandiose appeal of these megaprojects, basic practical questions seem to get ignored. This is exemplified in the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement, which consists of drilling a highway through waterlogged, vastly unstable soil, with little knowledge of the possible obstacles therein. Similar concerns come to mind in the REM plans; the projected Bassin Peel station, a hybrid of what previously was two separate proposed stations, is planned to lie underwater, with exits on either side of the canal. Given Montreal’s recent construction history, it’s hard to see where this could go right.
Plans such as the REM attempt to solve disparate, smaller-scale transportation problems by treating them as a whole, no matter how distant or disconnected they are. They somehow formulate a mega-solution to fix everything in one. One could argue that smaller-scale projects, or even amalgamations of these, are harder to publicize and thus support. However, recent evidence, such as the success of the Move Seattle Levy, passed in 2015, would disprove that.
Although any large project will have its downsides, the REM is particularly riddled with issues. Yet the problems with the plan itself are just the start. It solves none of the smaller-scale, neighborhood-specific concerns that have gone unaddressed, yet it somehow bypasses previous plans the city has stalled on for years. Trams on Côte-des-Neiges, Park Avenue and in the Old Port, an extension of the blue line to Anjou, or at the very least some respite for hugely underserved Route 141 riders, and real bus rapid transit on corridors such as Pie-IX or Sauvé/Côte-Vertu are just some of the urgent, smaller-scale issues that come to mind.
The REM also represents an epic kick in the teeth to transit equity. The sheer neglect that the project shows to underserved, underprivileged areas in Montreal such as the South-West sectors of Lachine and LaSalle, who have to continually fight for basic bus service, is unnerving. This is especially true when one considers the fact that because of the opaque, rushed planning process, which incorporated little public involvement, there is no evidence to show that route alternatives through these areas were ever considered, even for lines where such alignments would make sense.
Before the city builds a dreamy, futuristic train to connect low-density suburbs, it needs to fix the real, core concerns that have been neglected for years. The problems with the REM itself have been well documented; it’s the lack of progress on other transportation priorities that really makes the plan insulting. Somewhere in the glamor of expensive, shiny infrastructure and human engineering prowess, the needs of the communities most warranting basic transportation improvements were forgotten.
[1] Just the first few seconds of this video by New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority on the Second Avenue Subway should help to substantiate this statement.