After the West and East of Montreal, it is the turn of the South Shore to have a REM imposed. The method is proven. We leave the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM) on the sidelines, we ask CDPQ Infra to decide whether, on the sole criterion of a generous return on investment, the project interests it and, if so, we announces a project whose mode − a light aerial train − was immediately selected, without any study of relevance having been carried out, and this, regardless of the needs and the nature of the environments where it will be implemented.
Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
Here, there is no competition, not even at the preparatory study stage. The hypothesis of a tramway on which we had been working for a few years was simply dismissed out of hand. Then, to pass on this rebuff, we show ourselves to be a good player: the City of Longueuil will be invited to the partners’ table. But, let it be said, the games are done. It will be REM 2.0 or nothing.
The authoritarian governance favored by Quebec in this file makes it possible − once again − to force the game and, by bypassing the usual methods and stages of planning projects of this scope, to conceal the fact that we – and in especially elected municipal officials – still do not know what the REM de l’Ouest will really cost and even less the REM de l’Est, both in terms of fixed assets and recurring costs.
We are therefore asking elected officials on the South Shore to show blind trust in an organization that has cultivated, under cover of industrial secrecy, the opacity of decision-making processes since the beginning of the REM saga.
But, by hastily announcing this announcement, whose electoral significance is all too obvious, the Prime Minister intends to create a diversion. It must make people forget, or at least trivialize, the admonishment inflicted on CDPQ Infra by the ARTM and the Société de transport de Montréal (STM), as well as the full-throttle charges led by its minister for metropolitan France against the two organizations . But he is also betting that Longueuil residents and their elected officials will be more willing to hand over Old Longueuil and other sensitive neighborhoods to CDPQ Infra. He could therefore lecture the mayor of Montreal and those who oppose the REM de l’Est.
Especially since the Prime Minister was reassuring by suggesting that it would suffice to paint the pillars of the infrastructure white to guarantee their integration. This says a lot about the seriousness with which the latter takes the legitimate fears of citizens and the severe warnings of experts. But it also shows that the government leaders and the project managers at CDPQ Infra are showing unacceptable insensitivity in this matter with regard to the architectural and urban planning dimensions of the project. That nothing, in what is now observable on the ground in the case of the Western REM, shakes the certainties of each other is simply amazing.
It is as if the performances, the economic benefits and the self-proclaimed environmental virtues of the REM justified the stigma inflicted on the urban landscape and nearby built environments.
The Legault government is erecting the worst infrastructural legacy that Quebec will have known since the construction, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the highways, which partly destroyed and disfigured the central neighborhoods of Montreal, Quebec and Gatineau and whose severe impacts must now be corrected at great expense, if it is possible to do so. However, contrary to what generally happened at the time, it is not admissible today to plead ignorance. The criticisms made over the past three years by many transport specialists and planning professionals leave no doubt. The negative impact on built environments will be considerable and irreversible, architectural signature or not.
There is still time to avoid the irreparable. But, for that, you have to show humility and recognize that you were wrong. Others have done it in the past. This made it possible to avoid, in the early 1960s, the construction of an elevated highway in the right-of-way of rue de la Commune, and the erection, in the 1980s, of a housing complex whose location in the axis of McGill College would have destroyed the visual breakthrough on Mount Royal. Not to mention the rejection by the authorities of the Old Port, following citizen mobilizations, of real estate projects whose construction would have deprived us of a port redevelopment whose merits are recognized internationally.
Let’s learn from these experiences. Let’s give ourselves the means for real success by giving cities and the ARTM the responsibility of thinking about the development of the metropolis and its public transport system.