No matter how expertly our ministers don their construction helmets in front of the cameras, it’s not going to go well. It is too late to repair some damage.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
I write this with all the sympathy in the world for the motorists who will suffer from this Monday morning the endless traffic jams in the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel: there will be no easy solution.
It’s true, the lack of foresight and coordination is frustrating. It’s hard to understand how the Mobility Montreal steering committee has been able to meet only once since 2018. It’s hard to accept that Quebec is just beginning to think about carpooling and the impacts on trucking.
But there is a limit to miracle cures. We have already improved the service of the Mont-Saint-Hilaire commuter train, the yellow metro line and a few bus lines. Even if the reflection had started last year, we could not have done a miracle either.
Even if we add lifeboats, that will not be enough. Because at the same time, we continue to overload the ship.
Our elected officials thought small. They managed transport based on their electoral clientele. With tunnel vision.
The overwhelming majority of decisions were made to please individuals by promising them that they could get to their destination on their own in the comfort of their car.
I don’t blame motorists. When you have to drive the kids to school before working downtown, when you don’t have a million dollars to afford a house near a subway station, you do what you can. We work it out, one day at a time. And living in a condo is not for everyone.
But an elected official should not think at this level. It must rise to reflect collectively. By asking: what will happen if everyone acts according to their individual interest? How to reconfigure the choices to obtain a better result?
Alas, few have dared to do so. The worst have dumbed down the debate by reducing it to moral terms. Like: do not demonize motorists.
No one deserves to be judged, of course! But we can calmly state a few facts. Since the turn of the century, the number of vehicles has been growing even faster than the population. They also get bigger and therefore take up more space.
Year after year, roads are funded more than public transport. There was the REM and a few other projects, but they weren’t enough to reverse this trend.
Quebec still subsidizes drivers. The bill for the State exceeds what they pay in direct taxes (petrol, registration, tolls, driver’s license). Of course, they also finance the roads with their taxes. But they also generate a cost in terms of pollution and congestion.
In the early 1980s, promises were made of the imminent extension of the metro’s blue line in the East. We are still waiting for it.
In 2009, the Charest government planned to add four stations on the yellow line in Longueuil. The idea is found in a shredder of the Ministry of Transport.
The Parti Québécois proposes to make public transit free in the east end of Montreal. But the financial obstacles are rather in the 450, where the bus and the train are more expensive, and in the underfunding of the network.
For certain journeys, the solo car will always remain irreplaceable. But if so many people prefer it, it is also because the other options are not attractive and do not suit them. Our car fleet is too often used to move empty spaces. Carpooling remains a taboo. Quebec is doing next to nothing to encourage it, and the Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain is not showing leadership either. It was the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal that spoke the loudest to reduce solo driving!
For the CAQ government, the electric car serves as a pretext to absolve oneself of widening and extending the highways, even if this will only accelerate urban sprawl without reducing congestion in the long term.
Another example of this bias is that electric bikes manufactured here are not subsidized, while thousands of dollars are distributed for imported “green” cars. I know, it’s not a solution for everyone. The effect on traffic in the tunnel would be marginal. Still, in terms of principles, this unfair treatment shows what weighs the heaviest in the balance of Quebec.
Politics serves to resolve those dilemmas where citizens, acting rationally from their point of view, produce a collectively losing outcome.
Motorists cannot build a subway, a river shuttle or a train themselves. They are forced to choose according to what is on the menu.
It is up to the state to offer them something other than the old recipe that is making more and more people sick.