10 facets of public transport in Montréal
Discover 10 facets of public transport in Montréal, local host of the 2017 UITP Summit.
Tunnelling an island
Île Notre-Dame, in the middle of St Lawrence River, was built largely from 15 million tonnes of backfill extracted when tunnelling the metro between 1963-1965. It took ten months to create this artificial island in preparation for Expo ’67.
Walk-through trains
Roll-out of the new Azur metro rolling stock began in 2016. Unlike their predecessors, these ‘boa’ trains have no partitions between the cars. As such, they are the longest ‘on tyre’ rolling stock in operation in the world today with this interconnected design – the Paris metro ‘boa’ units are each 75-metres in length.
On the long & narrow
The, 2.5-metre metro gauge is unique to North America, where systems are typically 3.15 metres wide. To compensate this reduced track width, the nine-car trains are 152-metres long.
Golden Jubilee!
The metro celebrated its 50-year anniversary on 13 October 2016. To mark the occasion, operator STM exchanged artwork with its Belgian counterpart the STIB, in Brussels. The latter, which celebrated its 40-year anniversary on September 20 of the same year, also shares a tradition of integrating art and architecture into its system. For Montréal, the new piece of art – Soleil de minuit (Midnight Sun) by Belgian artist Adrien Lucca – comprises 14 stained glass, backlit LED panels, which represent the sun in Brussels at different times during the summer solstice. It is installed at Place-d’Armes station, one of the busiest in the network, and located just below the Palais des congrès exhibition centre, where UITP’s Global Public Transport Summit takes place this May 2017.
French influence
When building the metro in the 1960s, serving mayor of Montréal Jean Drapeau took inspiration from the Paris rubber-tyred system, the most modern at the time. Inaugurated 14 October 1966, the system was the first on tyres in North America, and the second in the world after Paris.
Jewel in the crown
A distinctive, Art Nouveau wrought-iron entrance adorns Victoria Square metro station. It was donated by Paris public transport operator RATP in 1967. An example of French architect Hector Guimard’s famous work, it commemorates the cooperation between French and Canadian engineers in creating the metro. Like in Paris, the light globes on the entrance have been replaced with polycarbonate replicas for safety reasons. The originals are now in safekeeping – one with the RATP, the other in the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts.
End of the track… and beyond
In March 2016, STM issued a call for proposals on giving a second life to some out-of-use metro cars dating from the 1960s. Proposed projects included transforming one car into a café-workspace, integrating eight cars into a multi-use building in the city’s Innovation District, using one car for fire prevention training at a college, and morphing 16 train-car doors into a work of art.
REM – automatic for the people
Plans for a driverless light rail commuter system, baptised Réseau électrique métropolitain (REM), seek to double the existing 69km of the metro network, whose four lines are over capacity. Proposed in the spring of 2016 and supported by the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) pension fund, the REM, if built, will be designed to connect with existing metro stations. Its routes will reach the outskirts of Montréal’s suburbs and provide a link to Montréal–Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport.
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