The public transport companies of the great Montreal region are exploring their options to reduce the growing financial burden linked to the drop in traffic on their network, but the challenge is considerable. State of play.
The general manager of the Société de transport de Montréal (STM), Luc Tremblay, does not hide it. Its 2022 budget, presented a few days before Christmas, is “artificially balanced”. The STM has in fact provided for a “shortfall” of $ 43 million, a sum that it will have to find this year in order to close the current gap between its expenses and its forecast revenues.
This situation is mainly due to the drop in ridership of the transport company’s metro and bus network. Ridership had recovered by mid-December to 59% of what it was before the pandemic, but that percentage may have fallen again since new restrictions were put in place surrounding the rise of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 in the province, estimates the STM.
Now, “what people forget is that the situation [financière de la STM] was already critical long before the pandemic, ”recalls Luc Tremblay, in an interview with Duty. Even before the start of the pandemic, the STM had to reduce its administration costs “to the minimum”, while considerably increasing its expenses related, among other things, to paratransit, a service for which demand “has exploded” in recent years. years, while “the subsidy rate [du gouvernement] has remained the same ”.
“It means that when the pandemic arrived, it just accentuated a crisis that was already there,” said Tremblay.
With the onset of the health crisis, the STM therefore had to dip more into its “drawer funds” to partially absorb the loss of income linked to the drop in ridership in its network. A “freeze on new positions” for its administrative employees currently applies, among other things, while the use of overtime has been reduced “everywhere” in the hope of “freeing up money”, indicates the general manager of the STM.
When the pandemic arrived, it just accentuated a crisis that was already there.
Telework
However, these measures will not be sufficient to overcome the financial impasse in which the STM finds itself. To achieve additional savings, the organization intends to end several office space leases within a few years. Its administrative employees, when they will not be working from home on a work-study basis, will therefore have only one place to go at the end of the pandemic, namely at Place Bonaventure, in downtown Montreal. “It will not only save rent costs, but also increase productivity,” said Luc Tremblay.
The Société de transport de Laval also intends to reduce its future needs for office space by asking its administrative employees to work from home “50% of the time”, at the end of the pandemic, indicates the director general of the organization, Guy Picard. “In the medium and long term, there are huge savings to be made,” he says.
On the other hand, the STM reduced the major investments it plans to make over the next ten years to improve its network by approximately $ 2 billion, for a total of $ 15.9 billion. It thus did away with the possible addition of platform doors in the metro network, which would have made it possible to reduce customer service stoppages.
The STM also intends to “push back” the lifespan of some of its buses by continuing to run them after the 16-year limit normally respected.
“There may be a few more broken down buses, it is less good for the service”, foresees Mr. Tremblay. As for the major maintenance of the Azur metro cars, which was scheduled for 2022, this has been postponed until next year. “There are no safety issues, I assure everyone, but there could be additional downtime,” says Luc Tremblay. A situation that worries the lecturer at the University of Montreal and expert in transport planning Pierre Barrieau.
“Reducing maintenance is like reducing the frequency of cleaning buses. This is the kind of thing that can cause users to lose permanently, ”he apprehends.
However, “we no longer have any leeway. We have reached the point of having to cut service and we don’t want to get there, ”insists Mr. Tremblay.
The arrival of the REM
Moreover, if the STM has managed to keep more or less the same service offering in its bus and metro network as that which was in effect in 2019, the situation is very different for the Réseau de transport de Longueuil (RTL). . Its service offering is currently 92% of what it was before the pandemic, while around 30 bus lines have been withdrawn and around 100 employees laid off in 2020, including drivers and maintenance workers. A situation that worries the Director General of RTL, Michel Veilleux, as the start-up, this year, of the branch of the Metropolitan Express Network (REM) in the direction of the South Shore in the Montreal region.
“There will be a huge challenge to serve the population and bring them to the REM. That presupposes a service which will be adequate and which will respond to that, ”he recalls. However, the organization foresees a shortfall of 3.5 million in its 2022 budget, indicates Mr. Veilleux.
Same story with the transport organization exo, which operates the commuter train lines of the greater Montreal area and several bus lines. Currently, its service offering is 90% of what it was before the pandemic and several major projects have been delayed.
“The service offer in the outer suburbs being weaker than in the central sectors, the offer must meet expectations, especially in the context of the opening of the Rive-Sud branch of the REM, announced for summer 2022” , notes exo’s media relations advisor, Catherine Maurice.
Funding
Luc Tremblay thus urges the Quebec government and the Metropolitan Regional Transport Authority (ARTM) to increase the financial assistance granted to transport companies in the region, in the context of the pandemic.
“There is a total disconnection between what the ARTM gives us and what is required by the transport companies”, observes Guy Picard. Since the start of the pandemic, the STL has reduced its “support expenses”, in particular by reducing the hours of supervisors and expenses related to employee training, recalls its CEO. g.
“These are things you can do for a year, two years, three years. But after that, if it becomes a habit, we completely shut down the business, ”worries Mr. Picard. Despite everything, there is no question of reducing the service offer to users, he says.
“If we want to develop public transit, we have to provide service and we have to meet people’s needs. So the options for reducing the service that the ARTM asks of us are not going in the direction we should be going, ”drops Guy Picard.
By email, the ARTM for its part reiterated that it is continuing its efforts with the Government of Quebec and “all the partners” in order to find a way to “compensate for the shortfall in tariffs caused by the pandemic” and to find “new sources of income that are sustainable”.