A more expensive vehicle is not necessarily more reliable. Talk to Land Rover buyers… and to users of the Réseau express métropolitain (REM). However, by train as by car, there are sometimes more reliable models that also cost less. As long as you look a little…
The irony is that REM users, exasperated by all-too-frequent breakdowns, turn to automobiles, while no one among those who can afford to buy an SUV that is too big, too fragile and frankly too expensive dreams of making a electric train ride.
Elsewhere on the planet, much more daring technologies are currently being tested.
In China, CRRC, a state-owned train manufacturer, put its own electric, autonomous train system on the road in 2018, which now serves a handful of Chinese cities and is being tested in the United Arab Emirates and which interests Australia as well as African countries.
This is exactly the exportable business model that the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) dreamed of when it decided to operate an electric and autonomous train in Montreal. One difference is that the CRRC has built its own wagons locally, while those of the REM are manufactured in India.
In Quebec, in 2018, the Caisse was accused of abandoning Bombardier, which was at that time among the largest railway manufacturers in the world, along with Alstom and the CRRC. Alstom subsequently bought Bombardier’s rail division.
Predict the future
Interesting feature of the Chinese train: it is a hybrid vehicle. It is halfway between a light rail and a tram, since it relies on axles and tires and runs directly on the roadway. No expensive aerial superstructure, therefore. Its stations are in the center of the boulevards that it crisscrosses, a bit like the SRB Pie-IX, in eastern Montreal.
At the terminus, the train can refuel and then restart in the opposite direction. The CRRC, which is also the operator, recently began testing a hydrogen fuel cell version, another future solution for carbon-free transport.
If the Caisse and the government had invested part of the $8 billion that the REM cost in a green hydrogen distribution network for its train, it could today serve other transport systems, such as trucks , trains and boats.
It probably wouldn’t be profitable today, but it would have been an interesting bet. We see hydrogen as a future solution for decarbonizing heavy and commercial transport throughout the continent… even on water.
The Danish giant Maersk, one of the largest maritime carriers in the world, is testing hydrogen to replace fuels in its fleet, which it hopes to be carbon neutral before 2040.
In addition to being, despite itself, a net exporter of gasoline vehicles, with these thieves using it to send stolen SUVs across the Atlantic, the Port of Montreal would also have become an importer of vehicles zero emissions… and would stand alongside the Port of Los Angeles as a North American leader in tomorrow’s maritime transport.
Four Seasons ?
It is not only in China that autonomous public transport is emerging. The French giant Transdev is testing autonomous shuttles in Europe. The same Transdev which provided the City of Candiac with its own autonomous shuttle in 2018.
The Candiac project, a few kilometers south of Montreal, was anything but a success. The main reason: the shuttle had to follow markers on the ground which became invisible in bad weather. Rather than correct the problem, it was abandoned.
If the project had to be redone today, the shuttle would do better, they say. It would even find its way in winter by combining a satellite navigation system with almost millimeter precision with markers placed high up.
These shuttles should also be isolated from other road users. Driver unpredictability derails autonomous systems more than any other highway obstacle.
In Montreal, such an urban train could replace the central reservation of René-Lévesque Boulevard and continue its course on Notre-Dame Street at least as far as East Beach, at the end of the island.
It wouldn’t cost $8 billion, says Marie-France Laurin, a smart mobility consultant who is one of the few experts in the country certified on the subject by the Association for Commuter Transportation, a transnational NPO dedicated to optimizing transportation systems. .
For the price of a REM, we could install trains like those of Transdev or the CRRC in the east of Montreal, north to Saint-Jérôme, east to Saint-Hyacinthe and in many other directions.
But we don’t do it. “We find plenty of excuses in Quebec to avoid innovating,” says the Montreal expert, disappointed. There is too much fear of breakdowns and high costs, which is…exactly what is happening with the REM.
Except that at least we would have dared to innovate. Worse than failing when you take a risk is failing when you don’t take one.
Ah, a passing detail about the Chinese autonomous train: it’s free for users.
Land Rover, you will have understood, loves the REM.