Montreal’s public transit recovery is moving slowly, experts say

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Expect more government bailouts of transit systems, as recovery to pre-pandemic passenger levels is taking longer than expected, experts say.

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Last month, the province announced a $ 100 million contribution to the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain for the 2022-2023 budget year. The ARTM governs public transportation in the Montreal region and had asked transit authorities to tighten their belts to balance their budgets.

With this contribution, the ARTM said that the transit authorities will not have to reduce the number of passengers. Overall, the province is contributing $ 327 million to shore up the transit authorities in the province next year.

Preventing transit systems from reducing their services is vital to the economic recovery of cities, explained Matti Siemiatycki, associate professor and acting director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.

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He said that, for the most part, transit authorities across the country have refrained from cutting off service, and that was the right move, because it allowed front-line workers to get to their jobs. But keeping operations going has been difficult, as transit authorities across the country rely on revenue from the fare box as a major source of funding.

Going forward, governments must ensure that authorities do not cut off essential transit service, because that would start a “death spiral” of continued decline in passengers and declining service, Siemiatycki said.

The traffic defender, François Pépin, agreed.

“If we cut services, the number of passengers will plummet even more and it will take many years to return,” said Pépin, president of Trajectoire Québec. “We will have many more cars on the road.”

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Siemiatycki said that the plummeting number of passengers in transit could lead to “a recovery based on the car and that it will have terrible impacts in terms of traffic, as well as pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and all kinds of other impacts.” .

And there are already worrying signs, he said. Since the pandemic began, there has been an increase in car ownership, a faster exodus to the suburbs off the island, and an increase in both bike and carpool memberships, Siemiatycki noted.

“People’s habits have changed,” he said, adding that the situation is likely to improve once the city center reopens to office workers.

“It has been a difficult period,” said Isabelle Tremblay, spokeswoman for the Société de transport de Montréal.

However, he pointed out some bright spots. Although STM passenger numbers dropped by 80 percent in April 2020, it has rebounded steadily since then.

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“The good news is that in September, when people went back to school, we finally passed the 50 percent passenger level, compared to the same period before the pandemic, and since then, the number of passengers has continued. growing. At the beginning of last month, it was at 58 percent, compared to pre-pandemic levels, “he said.

That represents 740,000 trips per day of the week.

The recovery has been disproportionate in buses, as they serve schools and industrial parks. The metro, which mainly serves the city center, is lagging behind, he explained.

Tremblay said the STM understands that it is vital to attract people back to the bus and the subway and is planning a $ 1.1 million charm offensive, probably starting in January, if that is when the office workers return to the center. in greater numbers.

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“We are ready to welcome telecommuters when they return to the office,” he said. “We have added tools to our websites to help people plan their trips, so they can see the level of passengers on the bus and in the subway. In the case of subway cars, they can also find out which cars have fewer passengers. “

The theme of the advertising campaign will be “Interconnection” with advertisements on radio, television, newspapers, Internet and social networks. There will also be billboards on bus shelters.

“We want to reach out to those who have lost the habit of taking traffic,” Tremblay said.

Siemiatycki said that while the situation seems desperate now, he is confident that the traffic will recover in the long term.

“The opinion is that this is a shock to the system and that the traffic will re-emerge,” he said. “It will take time. As cities reopen and more people are away from home, traffic will pick up.”

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