The Montreal metro has the highest number of service interruptions caused by customers worldwide, international data reveals. These once again highlight the importance of a future screen door system, which is still on the ice.
Almost 52% of breakdowns that occur in the Montreal metro are actually due to passengers or employees. This is shown by a document evaluating the “performance in an international context” of the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) dated February 13, obtained under the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies.
The average for member metros of the COMET group, made up of 45 metropolitan metros in 41 cities, is significantly lower, at 27%. In Europe and North America alone, this figure is 40%.
Among comparable metropolises in the world, the transport company is one of the only ones not to have a platform screen door system. “We are an endangered species,” illustrates the carrier’s corporate government relations advisor, Simon Carreau, in an interview.
We know that everyone would want landing doors. But it’s a question of prioritization. We must first ensure the good health of existing infrastructures.
Simon Carreau, corporate advisor in government relations at the STM
Mr. Carreau deplores that the sums intended for maintaining assets “have fallen by 20% over five years in government”. “We are not going in the right direction towards the landing doors,” says Mr. Carreau.
According to him, the vast majority of metros with such a system “have implemented it from the start”, a bit like the Réseau express métropolitain (REM). “Installing it on an existing network requires a lot more work and resources,” he notes.
An immediate effect
Officially, the idea of equipping the Montreal metro with screen doors had been suspended in 2022 due to the difficult financial context of transport companies. Around 200 million had been promised by Quebec to carry out this project.
In its most recent budget, the STM, however, included a sum of 5 million “intended for the study of the project around 2032”, in order to take into account the estimated recovery in ridership and future major projects, such as the extension of the blue line to Anjou and the Eastern Structuring Project (PSE).
According to the STM’s director of planning, bus and metro operations, Patrick Hamelin, a system of platform doors would probably reduce the number of user-related breakdowns from 52% “to around 30%”.
“We would be able to almost halve the number of customer incidents, and really have a significant impact. All our longest incidents, such as violent death attempts, tunnel intrusions, would drop drastically,” he maintains.
To date, the general reliability of the metro remains quite respectable. The STM is so far ranked 16e on around thirty metros evaluated on the proportion of metro trips made without delay, i.e. in five minutes or less.
In North America alone, the Montreal company ranks second in this list. “We suspect that below us, there are mainly systems with landing doors,” notes Mr. Carreau.
The urgency of replacing the MR-73s
Out of a total of 40 metros analyzed, that of Montreal also ranks 22e in terms of rolling stock reliability, i.e. the average distance traveled between each breakdown. Since 2020, there has been a decline in equipment reliability, largely due to the aging of MR-73 trains.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
MR-73 metro car undergoing maintenance
These can be driven for an average of 150,000 kilometers before causing a major breakdown. The new Azur trains, for their part, go up to 1.5 million kilometers.
In short, time is running out, especially since the MR-73 trains will reach the end of their useful life by 2036. “What we are asking the government is to launch the studies. The bell has rung and we must begin this project,” says the general director of the STM, Marie-Claude Léonard.
His group estimates the replacement project for these trains at only 2.9 billion for the acquisition of new Azur trains.
Another billion should also be allocated to replacing equipment in maintenance garages and the train control system.
Meanwhile, the bus network will “especially need punctuality in the short term,” says Mme Leonard. According to documents, a Montreal bus arrives on time 81.4% of the time. A bus travels on average 17 to 18 kilometers per hour of service, good for 7e ranking out of 16 comparable companies.
However, this figure has been steadily declining since 2014, which increases operating costs. Ultimately, a return to commercial speed of 2014 levels would even allow savings of 22.5 million, according to the company, which will rely on the multiplication of lanes reserved for buses to get as close as possible.
With William Leclerc, The Press