I do appreciate your insights and almost always agree with you. But this one seems like a stretch.
You're welcome to your take, we'll disagree here though.
Yes, appropriating the tunnel did hamper Montreal's suburban trains; yes, technically, what you said about it going over budget is true. Yes, it currently breaks down in winter sometimes. But seems harsher on it than it deserved. The quality and frequency of the REM is far better than the commuter rail it replaced. It created a spine in the middle of the city with the connections to the Metro that would not have existed for another century if not done now.
The entire Metro system in Montreal is not yet a century old, indeed not even 70 years, there's no reason you couldn't double it in size in far less than a century.
I get that government's in Quebec (as elsewhere) spent at least a generation, if not two, dithering on subway expansion; but that was a political choice, not a necessity.
The inordinate costs of recent subways can be taken back out as easily as they were embedded. Replace private design with public, build shallower, and with cut and cover, where feasible. tender at 100% design, publicly finance, do not tender out maintenance or operation.
The budget increased from a shockingly low 6.3B to a more 'typical' 9.4B for 67 km of rail. Even with the increases, it seems a lot more efficiently designed and constructed than any currently under construction transit project in Ontario or Quebec. (Might not be completely accurate. I don't have the time to look at the numbers, especially for other provinces, during my lunch break.)
As per above, my argument on the REM is not against the absolute cost, its merely that the trades made to achieve that have some longer term adverse consequences some with very significant price tags now shifted to other projects (see new tunnel into downtown Montreal for Alto) a fair pricing of REM would include the entire cost of that tunnel.
Its also that proponents have oversold the gains and undersold the drawbacks.
This, by the way is what we are experiencing here with the Ontario Line which will come in years late, and at vastly higher sums that initially suggested, while inflating the cost of Alto significantly, impairing GO service for at least 5 years, and doing needless ecological damage, while creating a system more vulnerable to winter.
There are growing pains, but these will get ironed out.
I'm sure many will, but all the other issues will remain.
www.pa.gov
montrealgazette.com
(e.g. new version of REM de l’Est…).
www.thestar.com
