12 minutes or less wait | The STM is bringing back its high-frequency buses

Nine months after abandoning its “10 minutes max” lines, the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) is giving love back to its thirty circuits still considered frequent. Some 2,500 stops will now be identified in purple, certifying users that they will wait 12 minutes or less. A task which, however, seems very unrealistic in the eyes of the drivers’ union.

“We provide today’s solutions to today’s challenges. […] We really want to discount the frequency,” argued the president of the STM, Éric Alan Caldwell, at a press conference on Monday.

According to him, the promise of “10 minutes max”, abandoned in January in the midst of a budget deficit, was simply “no longer in line with the service offering”, but above all, “it was a little rigid for us enable us to be there where customers need us.”

“We could no longer keep this promise,” said Alain Labelle, division head of STM service planning, more clearly.

Before the pandemic, 31 bus lines were part of the STM’s “10 minutes max” high-frequency network. This number then dropped to eight bus lines, before being abandoned in early 2023.

These 31 lines will now be identified as “frequent”, with a visual identity entirely in purple, by a display on the bus as well as on the street stop. The purple color, which began to be installed this Monday, will essentially certify a wait of 2 to 12 minutes for a passage, “with generally a bus in less than 10 minutes,” maintains Mr. Caldwell.

Still uncertain about the future

The goal of the STM is to “gradually” increase the number of these frequent lines, but everything will depend on government assistance. The Minister of Transport, Geneviève Guilbault, must table this fall a plan for financing public transport over five years which will be decisive for the future.

The service offering will remain that which was confirmed at the end of August, i.e. 95% of the pre-pandemic level. Most of the frequency increase was made on 75 bus lines this fall, for an overall increase of around 3%.

Setting the maximum at 12 minutes instead of 10 is far from being a coincidence. “On the contrary, it is proven in the literature that 12 minutes is the service interval for which people do not ask questions,” explained Mr. Labelle in this regard. To date, the pre-pandemic ridership threshold hovers around 78% on the bus and 77% on the metro. In the evening and on weekends, however, ridership is practically 100%, on average.

“Not deliverable,” says the union

According to the president of the STM Bus Drivers’ Union, Frédéric Therrien, 31 lines with 12 minutes of maximum service, “this is not currently deliverable.” “Just this morning, between 160 and 170 drivers were missing. It would take us up to 200 more drivers every day,” he says.

Given the lack of available money, the STM “will necessarily have to further compress our schedules and workload,” fears Mr. Therrien. “This is not good news for us when we know that 40% of our members on sick leave are for mental reasons, so a burnout or stress. We have less and less time to do our work. »

At Trajectoire Québec, general director Sarah V. Doyon welcomed “good news from a communications point of view” on Monday. “Afterwards, what we will follow is to see if there will be more frequent lines in the coming years. It will also be necessary that the 12 minutes remain intact, that we do not stretch the definition of frequent line to have 16 minutes after three years,” she concludes.