The City of Longueuil is doing what every transit fan has done at some point in their lives: dream of extending Montreal’s metro lines far beyond their current terminuses into places it may or may not make sense for them to go.
Laval’s Gilles Vaillancourt makes a hobby of this. Even after getting an insanely overpriced extension of the metro into his territory fast-tracked before much-needed extensions into poor dense neighbourhoods in Montreal, he complains that the loop needs to be closed on the orange line with more stations on his territory.
Longueuil’s plan would be to add four metro stations in the Vieux-Longueul area, including a stop at CEGEP Édouard-Montpetit.
Of course, it’s better to have suburban mayors dreaming about metro extensions than strip malls and highways. But maybe there’s something behind the argument that politicians shouldn’t be in control of public transit.
I wouldn’t hold my breath. With the time / money it took to get the metro to Laval we’ll be lucky if we can go beyond LUDS before 2030!
This project’s been tossed around for a while in different versions, but metro construction gets bad press because people get sticker shock and don’t actually bother asking how it helps the local economy, environment, traffic and all that after it’s built.
http://www.ledevoir.com/2004/09/21/64249.html
Remember that it took a wacky elected official – Jean Drapeau – to get the thing built in the first place. Would removing elected officials make transport a slave to narrow cost-benefit analyses?
I wouldn’t mind a bit more cost-benefit analyses and a bit less “because it would be cool”. I think the Laval metro will eventually prove worth it, but the fact that we had an extension to Laval before Anjou has more to do with Laval ridings being more valuable politically than St. Michel ridings.
I dream of extending the yellow line too, but in the other direction (to the Parc station):
http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?hl=en&gl=ca&ie=UTF8&view=map&msa=0&msid=107906190992033194946.000457245a8ebb845e689&ll=45.521541,-73.595026&spn=0.08804,0.154495&t=p&z=13&lci=transit
Good call, though it doesn’t seem to have paid off for the PQ, does it? haha
http://www.cbc.ca/news/quebecvotes2008/map/2008/#63
On the other hand, they were the only ones willing to build metro extensions – bad news for metro fans.
A cost-benefit analysis could say anything. Are the benefits of cleaner air taken into account? Undeveloped land in distant suburbs? Energy efficiency? Trade balances? Marginally improved geo-political stability? Probably not. They’re more likely along the lines of “a bus will move the same 50 people around at half the capital cost and twice the operating cost and reduce traffic by X.”
When I moved to Longueuil five years ago, that yellow line extension ideal was already pretty shopworn. It would be innovative for the Mtl Metro in that it would run above ground. Ideally, people would NOT have to change trains to get into the yellow line proper.
But I’m not holding my breath. It’s all just talk and even if they got the green light now it wouldn’t open for another five years. On the bright side, it means I would once again be walking distance to a Metro station, which would be awesome!
Longueuil is a lot more densely populated than either Laval or a good portion of Montreal Island. I think this extension is worth it.
i think it should go as far as the saint hubert airport with a possible extension to promenades st bruno in the future this would end the need for outlying ares to bring their busses in to the downtown core