The beauty with the East REM is that the mistakes of its big brother in the West have yet to be made.
We must therefore continue to study them to avoid repeating them.
Take what is happening in L’Île-des-Sœurs and Brossard.
It’s not all negative. Far from there.
In L’Île-des-Sœurs, the arrival of the REM promises to make the Pointe-Nord district a place where people can live six minutes by train from downtown, in a zero-emission and zero-waste building.
There are several reasons to be enthusiastic about this rare Montreal example of TOD, for Transit-Oriented Development – this expression dear to urban planners which designates places built around public transport axes, where you can get around without a car.
Montreal badly needs such neighborhoods. And it needs them to be dense, because the city lacks housing and these are the best places to build it without exacerbating traffic problems and urban sprawl.
To current residents of L’Île-des-Sœurs who claim that the “culture of the car” is strong on their island and who are concerned about the traffic problems of the new development, we answer: how on earth can you fight this culture if isn’t it precisely by building housing near train stations?
We want this TOD to be successful in order to give residents a taste for living there. And for it to serve as a model as the first phase of the REM unfolds, when the Eastern REM is back on the drawing board and when the blue line of the metro is (finally!) on its way to be extended.
However, a glance at the map of the Pointe-Nord district is enough to see the problem. A big snag in the form of a scar: that of Autoroute 15. The TOD will literally be built around the Décarie Autoroute, just at the entrance to the Samuel-De Champlain Bridge – the busiest bridge in all of Canada.
From a public health perspective, this is far from ideal. Extremely dense road traffic generates noise and pollution. And since electric cars also emit fine particles, the problem will not completely resolve over time. The Direction de santé publique de Montréal has already documented the health risks near major highways1.
Why a new district turned around a highway like this? Clearly, because the REM station was planted there. And that the TOD concept is to build around the stations.
In Brossard, it is even more deplorable: the Panama and Du Quartier stations are located in the middle of Highway 10. The Brossard station is in the interchange of Highways 10 and 30.
For the promoter, it was of course infinitely simpler to completely follow the route of the motorways. Why bother with small detours and position a station in the best place for future residents?
With the REM, the Caisse de depot et placement du Québec has therefore built a public transport network. But we do not feel that it has made every effort to make it a development axis that ties in with the urban fabric and that makes it possible to maximize real estate possibilities.
This is what absolutely must change with the Eastern REM, particularly with the housing crisis that is raging. This is a vision that Mayor Valérie Plante defends and which must prevail.
We talk a lot about the route of this new train, obviously with good reason. But a train network is not just rails. They are also stations. The lessons of the first REM show that we must not neglect their location or their development.
These stations should not only be seen as points along a route or as infrastructures aimed at serving places that are already inhabited. They must be used to densify the city, to review our ways of living and getting around.
They must create living environments that will make Montrealers want to live there. Ideally not right next to a highway.