Five summers ago, Greater Montreal’s transportation planning body submitted a long-awaited big-picture transit plan for the region to the Quebec government.
It was rejected for being a $57-billion wish list rather than a set of concrete priorities ready to be put in motion.
The Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain was also sent back to the drawing board in 2023 when it took over planning what was once known as the REM de l’Est after the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec bailed.
Instead of an elevated light-rail line, the ARTM first proposed an underground route. Then-Quebec premier François Legault said the $36-billion price tag almost made him choke on his coffee.
The ARTM came back to the government with the Projet structurant de l’Est, a surface line to east-end Montreal evaluated at $18 billion.
With that project now in the planning stages, the Blue Line extension to Anjou underway and the REM network nearing completion, the regional transit planning body is once again looking toward the future.
The ARTM has identified eight corridors that will be the focus of detailed study through 2029.
First up is St-Laurent—Chomedey. Later in 2026, the ARTM will take a look at the west-central sector of Montreal.
After that will come the Laurentians, Les Moulins, the eastern part of Montérégie, St-Laurent—Ahuntsic—Montreal North, Marguerite-d’Youville and Roussillon.
These are vaguely named areas with no particular transit projects attached to them for the moment. It’s all a bit pie-in-the-sky — as the ARTM’s visioning exercises tend to be.
But the mayor of Laval has grabbed the ball on the study of the St-Laurent—Chomedey corridor and is running with it.
Stéphane Boyer is strongly advocating for an extension of the Orange Line of the métro from the Côte-Vertu station to Laval. He wants to see six to eight new stations, including one at Carrefour Laval, and the loop closed with the Montmorency end of the Orange Line.
Boyer has already made the case for repurposing Lisette, the giant machine currently digging the tunnel for the Blue Line expansion.
He also pre-empted the ARTM by releasing some compelling figures. According to the mayor, his proposed new leg of the métro would serve over 31,000 passengers, take 11,000 cars a day off the heavily used interchange of Highways 40 and 15, and get Laval residents downtown in 35 minutes instead of 50.
Boyer argued this project would be 10 times more useful than the Troisième Lien, the on-again/off-again plan to connect Quebec City to Lévis. Past studies have indicated just 3,300 vehicles a day would use the link and it would shave mere minutes at most off the trip, for the eye-popping price tag of $9 billion or more.
The Laval métro would offer more bang for the buck if it costs $10 billion, as Boyer has suggested.
Unfortunately, need and ridership are not always the primary drivers when it comes to deciding which new transit projects get funded and built.
Just ask former Montreal mayor Valérie Plante. After riding to office on a signature plan for a new Pink Line of the Montreal métro in 2017, she, too, championed an extension of the western branch of the Orange Line to Laval.
It was urgently needed to take pressure off the busy eastern portion of the métro. Plante also pushed for a station at Bois-Franc to meet up with the now-in-service REM.
No dice. The pandemic happened, transit use fell dramatically, priorities shifted and mass transportation in Montreal was hit with an ongoing crisis in operational funding.
Later in her tenure, Plante adopted plans for a tramway from downtown to Lachine through the dense and highly populated southwest of the city as the partial fulfilment of her Pink Line dreams. But that much-needed project was quietly shelved by the Quebec government in 2025, despite Plante having forfeited federal funds to Quebec City’s tramway in exchange for a promise of future investments.
Almost 20 per cent of Montrealers live in the area between Dorval and downtown, encompassing the boroughs of Lachine, LaSalle and Verdun. The population there is expected to grow by 27,000 over the next 20 years. Yet the area is badly underserved by transit, as previous studies by the ARTM have shown. (Presumably its fresh look at the west-central Montreal corridor later this year can rely on earlier consultations.)
This level of demand and need should also put a tramway (or métro extension, or rapid bus line) near the top of the region’s priority list for public transit. It shoulda, coulda, woulda already been in the planning phases if Plante hadn’t been betrayed in her sacrifice.
But alas, the balancing act between different cities, municipalities, regions and constituencies often alters the political calculus for the decision-makers in Quebec City who hold the purse strings.
The ARTM is great at setting lofty goals. With an additional 650,000 people projected to be living in Greater Montreal by 2050, resulting in an extra one million daily vehicle trips on the region’s roads, it wants half those voyages to be taken on public transit or through active modes like cycling and walking.
That would mean 2.3 million more daily transit trips and 800,000 fewer drives compared to 2018.
But the ARTM isn’t so good at getting shovels in the ground. To have any hope of reaching its objectives (and curbing both traffic and greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change), it needs to get the ball rolling today.
Boyer is right to get out in front of the métro extension and use the corridor study to start bending ears and twisting arms now. He’s a step ahead of other mayors in going to bat for a concrete plan.
The most compelling cases don’t always get the green light. But sometimes strong backers make a big difference.
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I started at The Montreal Gazette in 2000 as an intern. Since then I have covered the National Assembly and courts, worked on the assignment desk and written editorials, before debuting as city columnist in 2017.
ahanes@postmedia.com