McGill students are organizing a metro party on Friday evening, meeting at 9pm at the back end of the platform at Henri-Bourassa metro (why they don’t start at Montmorency is a mystery, but whatever). The Facebook page shows 77 “confirmed guests”, which translates to about 15-20 people actually showing up.
The party is similar to metro parties that took place in March, May and October of last year.
Everyone’s getting into the spirit.
On Wednesday evening, the STM’s board of directors approved the creation of a new express bus route serving Nuns’ Island. According to Le Magazine Ile-des-Soeurs, the line will be numbered 480, and will go between Lucien L’Allier station (Mountain and de la Gauchetière), down René Lévesque and University to the new Bell headquarters at the north end of Nuns’ Island, a 15-minute trip in each direction. The route, which will run toward the island during the morning rush hour and toward downtown in the evening (making it the only express bus that travels away from downtown in the morning), is expected to serve 1300 passengers starting in September.
If you take the 211 bus to work, you might want to reconsider. Not only does it carry a risk of bursting into flames, but there’s also the minor problem of wheels falling off on the highway. But that’s OK, because at least the faulty brakes were still working.
UPDATE (April 10): The Chronicle reports the STM says it’s a coincidence (duh).
The Journal’s Noée Murchison is really stretching for “investigative” stories. In her latest EXCLUSIVE SCANDAL REPORT, she determines that bus drivers don’t always check transfers, and that metro ticket-takers will stand by while people take multiple transfers from the dispenser.
And while I’m here, why does she insist on referring to herself in the third person? Does she think that makes her sound more serious?
(via mtlweblog)
Also: Way to go LCN, way to show your editorial independence by re-reporting a non-story.
If you’re a regular transit user in Montreal you’ve noticed that the STM has been using photos of its metro stations as art on its monthly bus/metro passes.
Unfortunately, someone made an oopsie this month. The caption on the April pass says “Station de métro Square-Victoria”, but it’s clearly a photo of the ceiling of Jarry station.
The reason for the error? They forgot to change it from the March pass, which was of the Square Victoria station.
Oops.
Ouch:
The text, in case you can’t read it:
COOLING IT Montreal Transit Corp. crew and a city firefighter check a 211 bus that caught fire outside the Lionel Groulx métro station yesterday. The fire was caused by mechanical problems, police said, and no one was hurt.
Death trap? What death trap?
(As I mentioned to a concerned fellow traveller yesterday, nobody is seriously injured in these kinds of fires, since they take a while to get this intense and the buses are pretty well designed to be able to get everyone out quickly. Still, spontaneous combustion is a concern.)
Here’s an interesting little website: busmob.com. It scrapes the STM’s website for bus departure times and reformats them in an easy-to-read-on-mobile-phones page.
It’s not perfect (it doesn’t do holidays and other special situations, for example), and in many cases it’s probably easier to call the AUTOBUS number and get the automated voice to tell you departure times. But if for some reason the STM’s website is too cumbersome for your cell, this site might just be useful for you.
UPDATE: And here’s a website that acts as a Google Maps frontend for the STM’s Tous Azimuts service.
Starting this week, the STM is testing a new audio signal that will accompany the closing of metro doors. The beep, which you hear in other cities like Toronto, is mostly useful for blind passengers who can’t see when the doors close (and may not hear it quite as well).
They’re looking for feedback about the sound before they begin installing it on all trains.
The first step in the STM’s plans to overhaul West Island bus service takes effect Monday when the spring bus schedules start.
On Monday morning, two bus routes, the 209 Des Sources and 470 Express Pierrefonds, will take significant steps in the transition from rush-hour to all-day service.
The 209 (PDF schedule) will be an all-day (but still weekday-only) bus, with departures every 25-35 minutes during the whole day. Final departures will be at 10:55pm (from Dorval) and 12:05am (from Roxboro-Pierrefonds). The STM considers this a “trial run” according to the flyer (PDF), to be re-evaluated based on demand.
The 470 (PDF schedule) was turned into an all-day-weekdays bus in October, but that move was immediately criticized by myself and others because there was no service past 7pm. The STM has finally decided to rectify that situation, adding departures every half hour until about 9pm in both directions. That still doesn’t sound late enough (most Fairview buses run until midnight), and it’s still not service on weekends, but it’s a step in the right direction.
The next changes come in June with the summer schedules. They’re expected to include:
UPDATE (March 21): The STM is also making a fuss about modest increases to lines 77 CEGEP Marie-Victorin (PDF flyer) and 86 Pointe-aux-Trembles (PDF flyer)
The STM’s bus and metro drivers have voted overwhelmingly in favour of a negotiated agreement which, if approved by the STM’s board, will mean no strikes (from that union, there’s still the maintenance folks to worry about) until at least 2012.
This ad from the Fondation Centre de cancérologie Charles-Bruneau always creeps me out.
I know cancer is a big deal and we should be trying to fight it, but isn’t the ad a bit … blunt?
Global Quebec likes to run the occasional 5-second ad for anchor Jamie Orchard’s blog. I find this odd, because she updates it about once a month, which hardly makes it qualify as a blog, much less make it advertising-worthy.
Today, she added her first new post since Dec. 4, complaining about bus service on the island. It’s an example of what not to do with blogs.
Let me explain:
There are other minor things like the horrible formatting, but those two are the most important.
Mainstream media outlets are clueless about this blog thing and are just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks. Unfortunately, that leaves us with a lot of junk. I don’t want my journalists to sound just like those uninformed idiots on MySpace. I want something new and interesting. The faster journalist-bloggers (and the media companies who don’t want to pay them a cent to do this extra work) understand that, the faster we’ll see blogs that are worth our attention.
And while I sympathize with people whose buses arrive late, I don’t think exaggeration is warranted here. This isn’t some third-world country. The vast majority of buses do arrive on time and take people to their destination without incident.
I lived for five years in the West Island taking a bus every day downtown to study. Up to three hours of transit time each day. Sometimes buses wouldn’t show up, and I’d be left out in the cold for up to an hour. But even when I got frustrated, I never condemned the entire system like others have. I moved closer to the city, next to a metro station where I don’t have to worry about catching a bus to get downtown.
Yes, Montreal (and Quebec, and the unions, and STM management and everyone else) should do more to ensure quality public transit. But Montrealers need to be a bit more tolerant toward small disruptions in service. Montreal’s transit network is among the most reliable in the world, and I think we’ve taken that for granted.
This week’s Bluffer’s Guide concerns the unstable political situation in Kenya, which has already claimed hundreds of lives in a country that was supposed to be one of Africa’s democratic leaders. Worth taking a look in case you feel bad knowing more about the status of Jamie Lynn Spears’s pregnancy than about the difference between Kenya and Rwanda. For more, check out the excellent special sections from The Guardian and BBC News.
This week’s Justify Your Existence concerns the STM’s bus service improvements I mentioned a week and a half ago. Asked why three buses (18 Beaubien, 24 Sherbrooke and 121 Sauvé/Côte-Vertu) had reductions in service (primarily on the weekend) when they were announcing service improvements, the response was that these are normal seasonal variations in service for these lines. The STM changes schedules four times a year, and compared to the winter schedule of January-March 2007, there are no reductions in service:
At each schedule change, we look at the weekend offering, and we adjust based on customer demand. The 24 line, for example, mostly serves business workers, so fewer people take it during the weekend. There will be about 14 hours less service on the weekend for those three lines, but we’re adding over 115 hours of service to those lines during the week.
The STM and government-run car-sharing service Communauto have come to an agreement that allows people buying a year’s worth of transit passes to get a significant discount on membership fees for car-sharing.
It makes sense. The point of Communauto is that the car is used only when necessary, and public transit is used at other times.
But since both are largely government-funded services, the money is inevitably coming out of our pockets. Communauto is heavily subsidized, which is what allows it to have such low prices. With less revenue from users, they’ll have to rely on the government even more.
The AMT has quietly become the first transit agency in Quebec (and only the third in Canada behind Vancouver’s TransLink and Fredericton Transit) to add its routes and schedules to Google Transit.
Now, people using Google Maps to plan trips in Montreal will be given the option of using the train. Schedules for all five lines are included, but no buses so far. Google has some examples, like St. Jerome to Lucien-L’Allier station at 7pm (where the first available train is more than 12 hours later, assuming the next day is a weekday).
The search is still a bit clunky (it refuses to calculate routes from some general locations, and while it accepts “Gare Lucien L’Allier” as a location it doesn’t recognize “Gare Vendome” or “Gare Parc” or “Gare de la Concorde”), but it’s still pretty cool.
The next step is to see the STM, STL and RTL (as well as all the smaller AMT-run agencies) add their route information to the service. The STM already has a similar service with its clunky Tous Azimuts interface (which was nevertheless a technological breakthrough when it first came out). Hopefully converting data used in that service to Google’s Transit Feed Specification won’t be too difficult.
You’ll actually be waiting more, not less, for the 18 bus outside of rush hour.
The STM is trumpeting huge, noticeable improvements to bus and metro service that finally came into effect on Monday. The additions come in two parts:
The STM is adding 145 new departures every week to all but the yellow line. The goal is to reduce waiting times and get more people using the metro.
The change is most visible outside of rush hour. That means the very early morning, during the day, late evenings, at night and on the weekend. On weekdays outside of rush hour, the waiting times will all be reduced by at least a minute and a half - a rather noticeable change.
Going out today, I decided to time the intervals between metro trains. Sure enough, for orange line trains going through downtown at 6:45pm, the trains were just under six minutes apart on average, which the STM says is an improvement on the previous eight minutes.
Though the wait times during rush hour (when almost all trains are already in service) won’t come down much, this move might serve to eventually lighten that load a bit. An extended rush hour means that fewer travellers will organize their schedules around rush hour to take advantage of the short waits.
I can’t be the only one who prefers to travel during peak hours because of how much faster it is. Extending rush hour will spread this tendency out a bit and hopefully make it spike a bit less as the whistle blows at 5pm.
The other part to this service improvement is the more interesting one: the STM has announced additional buses being added to three popular lines: 18 Beaubien, 24 Sherbrooke and 121 Sauvé/Côte-Vertu. It’s also making the 54 Charland/Chabanel a rush-hour-plus-between-rush-hours service, which is becoming more and more popular (but to me only seems frustrating because the service stops by 7pm).
Today I went to the Beaubien metro bus stop for the 18 bus and observed as buses passed to pick up passengers headed east for the evening rush hour. Most of the buses had their seats filled, but none were so packed that nobody else could get on. They were running on intervals of about 3-4 minutes during rush hour’s peak (5:30pm), and 6-7 minutes just after rush hour (6:30pm).
This, despite complaints from the employees’ union that there’s a bus shortage affecting service.
Here’s the problem: The schedule itself hasn’t improved. If anything, service is being reduced on these three lines.
(Admit it, you missed this during the holidays)
Here’s another one of those what-do-these-names-have-in-common lists. Except this time, you can’t find the answer on Google Maps.
These names (in alphabetical order) meet a threshold of having at least three of something in Montreal. What is it?
UPDATE (9:30pm): After quite a few interesting guesses, the correct answer comes from HCD below. All of these names have at least three STM bus routes named after them:
Numbers in parentheses are for routes where the names form part of the bus route’s name, combined with “Est,” “Ouest,” “Metrobus,” “Express,” “R-Bus,” or the name of a second street.
In some cases, the duplication is due to having overlapping routes at different times (a regular route, a rush-hour reserved-lane route and a night route). Others, like Gouin, Henri-Bourassa and Sherbrooke are just so freakin’ long they have different routes stacked end to end.
As the holidays approach fast, radio stations are switching to all-Christmas-music formats, malls are packed with desperate last-minute shoppers, and TV starts to suck really bad.
What better time to contemplate that most exciting of holiday traditions: complicated transit service schedules!
Fear not folks. Below is a day-by-day guide to what you can come to expect from the Montreal-area transit networks. Take a glance at it if you’re planning to take a bus anywhere near Christmas or New Year’s this year.
And have a bit of sympathy for that bus driver who has to spend midnight on New Year’s Eve stuck at a traffic light handing out transfers.
The Agence métropolitaine de transport has still not recovered from this weekend’s snowstorm, and trains on the Dorion/Rigaud line are still not opreating operating properly, forcing delays during every rush hour since, for a variety of reasons (but basically “snow” and “cold”).
Spokesperson Mélanie Nadeau says she hasn’t seen anything this bad in six years.
Which is the same thing she said Sunday, which was “the worst day since I started.”
And apparently it’s worse than breakdowns in May, when she said nobody could remember anything as bad in 10 years.
How many more worst days is the AMT going to experience?
UPDATE: My mother points out that I misspelled “operating” above. I live with the unending shame.
