The mayor of Longueuil, Catherine Fournier, considers “unacceptable” the lack of communication that was offered by the operator of the Réseau express métropolitain on Monday evening to its many users who suffered a prolonged service outage lasting several hours.
“It is unacceptable to leave citizens in the dark about the reasons for the outage, about the duration of the outage. I think that there really is a change in direction that must be taken very quickly,” declared the mayor of Longueuil on Tuesday on the sidelines of a press conference in Montreal on the challenges of financing public transport.
Since the launch of its service between Brossard and downtown Montreal on July 31, the REM has been in a running-in period. Several slowdowns and interruptions of service have occurred in recent weeks, “problems” which were predictable, according to Ms. Fournier.
The latter, however, deplores the lack of information that was provided Monday evening to REM users who were faced with a service stoppage for several hours, during peak periods. On social networks, the light rail operator simply mentioned that the service was stopped, without specifying the cause, the estimated duration and the mitigation measures put in place for users affected by this outage. , which stretched from 3:45 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Many users reached by The duty described being stuck in the light rail for more than an hour without knowing why it was stopped between two stations. Other light rail users struggled to find information about the buses set up from 5 p.m. to help them get home. “Clearly, there is an improvement to be made in communications,” notes Ms. Fournier, who thus challenged the head of the REM, CDPQ Infra. I think there really is a change that needs to be made very quickly. »
“I agree with Ms. Fournier,” added the mayor of Montreal alongside her, without commenting further on this matter.
Joined by The duty Monday evening, CDPQ Infra indicated that this outage was linked to “technical problems with the computer system” which caused “errors at the control center”. Outages also occurred in the morning on Monday, as well as last Friday.
With Jeanne Corriveau