Is the REM the Future of Canadian Transit Expansion?

Reflections with the big REM Opening, and the idea of CanadaMetro.

Today, Montreal is opening the next and biggest phase of the REM project, extending the five-stop line to over 15 stops and 30 kilometres, from the south shore suburbs across the St. Laurent, under Mount Royal, and north to Laval, Deux-Montagnes, and to a small island, with automated metro trains (crazy stuff, I know what I’d do if I had a few million dollars to spare).

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With the REM’s second phase open, the spur that previously constituted the REM is a proper line. While the first phase of the REM sort of skirted downtown and Pointe St. Charles, and only ever connected to the sort of notoriously mediocre Gare Central, with phase two of the project to Deux-Montagnes, we are getting a whole lot more REM.

An interesting dynamic with this extension is that unlike a lot of transit expansion projects in this country, that are so expensive and sclerotic that they just barely make it across the finish line to their target destination. In many ways I think Deux-Montagnes isn’t the main event here; sure, it would be cool if the parking lots were replaced with some high-density walkable stuff that could form a new epicentre for the town, and a friend even mentioned the idea of buying up Ile Bigras to turn it into a car free Swiss-style urban village, but with our nations’s increasingly self-concerned old homeowner class and municipalities literally unable to see more than a few years into the future, I think the single family homes will mostly stay.

Instead, what I think is interesting with this project is the urban potential. As Oh The Urbanity talks about in their great video (which I am featured in briefly), a huge element of the project is connecting the city centre with both McGill and UdeM, and those Universities to each other, giving both what amount to metro interchanges on campus. Further to the north, but not quite into the suburbs, there are a number of stations in rather rough industrial locations, but there lies potential: huge redevelopments here wouldn’t just be satellites connected to the rest of the city by the REM, but a new generation of Montreal neighbourhoods with higher densities, great bike access from day one, and with the ever-present (in Montreal) Metro access just being provided by the REM on the surface instead of rubber-tired trains underground.

There is also a lot of infill station potential on the REM. The main topics of that conversation have naturally been at least two serious infill projects on the south shore leg, which would finally make this part of the REM feel like it’s serving urban Montreal instead of just an antenna. The reality is that there is easily far more opportunity to the north, both because of the many wide gaps between existing stations, and because of the sometimes giant tracts of developable land.

You could even imagine new stations being added only being served by the Airport and West Island branches, with bypass tracks for Deux-Montagnes trains, still providing fast service to the most distant suburbs, and frequent trains to infill locations.

Of course, with it, this phase brings a lot more character and colour. The line has small river crossings on more minor bridges, frankly almost bucolic environments to pass through every few minutes, the first elevated stations and embankment sections on the system, and two new underground stations, which manage to both feel like they could be in Tokyo or Paris, but also distinctly Montreal — the giant mosaics and exposed natural rock walls at Edouard-Montpetit in particular are amazing, though I imagine some work is going to be needed pretty quickly, since the station is connected to the metro via just two swing doors, and the elevator system is in a bit of a state of chaos without logical and orderly dispatching (there are screens so one can hope they are planning something more ordered than “run to the first opening elevator doors”). At Cote-de-Liesse, there is even a second southbound REM platform, which should allow another train to queue up and handle the surge of passengers when the huge EXO trains on the Mascouche line pull in and unload.

The REM isn’t quite done yet. While it is now a line, in the coming months and years it will become a true network, with the West Island branch to open in early 2026, and the airport finally getting connected up the year after that. Projections for the full network’s opening are for 150,000 daily passengers, but I’d be a bit disappointed if that’s all it got after a few years: If service is consistent and reliable and redevelopment continues apace, I see no reason this system couldn’t move 500,000 - 750,000 daily passengers in a decade or two. Not far from the ridership of the existing metro.

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Stepping back, I think the REM can paint us a picture of what the future of rapid transit in Canadian cities might look like: grand and great, if still compromised. On one hand, this is something that just isn’t the class of system you’d see in Singapore or Paris — and on one hand that annoys me: we could get close to that with better institutions and more competent governance. But then on the other hand, it is pretty good for such a massive and dispersed country that lacks for a single primal city that would force us to get it together with world-beating transit.

I say the vision is still grand and great, because on a micro scale we are getting the great passenger amenities. Bright open stations, platform screen doors, automated trains, climate control and super frequent service, transit that will be well-suited to the future and great for its users. But, at the same time, it won’t be the sort of tightly-integrated, master-planned, and capacious system you see in countries that live and breathe this stuff. We had that a bit with the Montreal Metro, but I just don’t see a path to build that way again without more money, better management, and a sort of ambition which I have, but which our leaders cannot imagine.

The REM is great, but France we are not. Saint Denis Pleyel on the Grand Paris Express By Chris93 - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149456284

In many ways, the compromises are not public facing. For the REM, the supply chain has been international. Few transit projects in Canada have seen their trains built overseas, but if your priority is more transit and not more North American train factories, ordering your trains from Asia like with the REM makes sense.

The project has also compromised by using existing rights-of-way. The REM runs along highways, transmission lines, and existing rail corridors, and it isn’t always pretty. You can always debate whether this is the right decision, but I think it’s a defensible one in a country that both a) can’t afford to put everything in tunnels in the “ideal” location, and b) is growing fast enough to reshape its urban areas to make these location more fitting.

People criticize the REM for running along highways, and claim that it got the centre span of the Champlain bridge “for free”, and I think these points are, well ... beside the point. The REM isn’t cheating by doing economically rational things, and protecting infrastructure for things like future rapid transit is something to be encouraged, not decried. It sort of reminds me of when political people decry an elected representative of their party for ideological impurity — these are the people getting elected! Maybe their ideological impurity is the point!

Of course, the REM did use tunnels where it made sense: it was able to reuse the century-old Mount Royal tunnel to go through the centre of Montreal, and a small new single-track tunnel was built at Montreal airport to pass under the runways and get to the terminal. But tunnels were used where technically required, not where they were politically expedient.

There’s also the interchanges. While the ideal integrated interchange station has cross-platform transfers or at least a tightly-integrated design, the REM’s approach of “minimal interface cross section”, where stations are close together, but touch each other as little as possible (see the vertical shaft down to Edouard-Montpetit from a new pavilion next to the existing metro, or the wide and high-capacity walkway that connects McGill Metro to McGill REM — but which keeps the station boxes themselves decoupled). This approach is similarly being taken in Toronto with the Ontario Line. Of course, we should still aspire for master-planned interchange structures, but this form of interchange building probably makes more sense if we plan to keep changing our minds, and suffering major cost problems (though I suppose if cost inflation in particular is a problem, then building a fully-integrated interchange today might still pencil out as better).

There were also just some smart design decisions. Maintenance bases are place at the very ends of three of the four branches, spreading work sites around the region, and utilizing lower land costs. Some of those huge industrial sites near the middle of the line could have made for fine operations facilities, but the strategic decision not to do that is reflective of more thoughtful thinking that isn’t purely obsessed with upfront costs (an underrated benefit of long-term “partnership” projects).

Now, the whole point of sectioning stuff like this off into its own part of the article is that I think the REM really highlights a model of transit building that is becoming uniquely Canadian. First, Vancouver built the SkyTrain as a regional automated metro across several projects, and then decades later Montreal built a similar system to augment its more urbane transit system — and with touches like screen doors and overhead wire electrification that reflect modernity, international best practice, and also a desire for long-term resilience and durability. In some ways, I think it’s worth asking if this perhaps not optimal, but still very good model should not be taken nationwide and treated as a sort of national standard. Maybe we could even call new systems built in this vein “REM”’s for a bit of bilingual fun — though I think I might prefer “CanadaMetro”.

What does making this a national standard look like? Well, we ought to try to build future Canadian rapid transit projects to very similar specs — the Ontario Line was honestly a missed opportunity to do this, since its specs are close (~3 metre wide trains, 1500 V DC overhead electrification) if not identical. This lets you start procuring large batches of trains for multiple lines at once, like some large cities such as Paris or New York do, but for multiple cities. Common technical standards would also let Canada’s engineers and builders learn to build structures to and for the CanadaMetro standard: bridges strong enough to hold the trains, but otherwise as slim as possible; transit-oriented development as tightly integrated as possible, and eventually operational learnings moving from one city to another. A practical element we could adopt ASAP would be prepping future bridges that might need to carry rapid transit one day in a similar way to the Champlain bridge, and with similar weight specifications. A new Ironworkers bridge in Vancouver and future Ottawa river and St. Laurent crossings come to mind.

In terms of allowing expansion across the nation, being able to build tunnelled, elevated, or at grade along highways, railways, and other corridors would offer the same purported benefits of “LRT” in being able to easily fit into existing Canadian urban forms. But unlike LRT, these systems would have very high frequency, and would be fast, and would have modern touches like screen doors, and the low operating costs that come with automation. In many ways, this would be “swinging for the fences” while other North American cities have built “light rail” because umm that’s what cities do, right? Since the REM shows the adaptation of an existing rail service, “hybrid rail” systems, or candidate corridors, like parts of the O-Trai,nor lines in Toronto and Vancouver also look like interesting options.

So, where else might similar regional projects make sense in Canada?

• Perhaps in Ottawa replacing Line 2 and maybe the Rapibus with a REM-ified rail system linked through a new city centre tunnel, allowing a direct connection in the centre of downtown, service on the urban section of Bank Street, and a truncated service on the current Line 2 from Carleton to Bayview.

• In Calgary, this might actually make more sense than current air rail link plans using the CP corridor to the airport as well as possibly highway right of ways to link Airdrie, downtown communities, as well as neighbourhoods to the cities west and northwest.

• This might actually be the most appropriate way to link Quebec City and Levis under the St. Laurent and perpendicular to the soon to be under construction tramway, also extending to serve other parts of the region.

• And it might even make sense in Toronto — some have actually previously discussed the idea of making a modernized midtown line something more akin to the REM, and theres a lot of reasons that might make sense.

• This approach also seems natural for an “Expo Relief Line” in Vancouver that operates as an express version of the original SkyTrain line which extends further into the suburbs, probably in a slightly higher capacity form.

• And at the same time, slightly lower capacity forms seems like a natural solution for smaller but growing cities like Halifax and Winnipeg that just wouldn’t be “transit first” in the same way if they built crappy trams as if they build fast regional automated metros.

So then, while the REM’s biggest opening is exciting for Montreal, and hopefully a huge step forward for all transit in the city (all transit ridership in Vancouver went up when the Olympics happened and Canada line opened and never returned to their formerly lower level), I think it also shows a promising path forward for cities across Canada.