A wise woman reminds us that we cannot complain about the effects when we fully consent to the causes. And as much as town planning like architecture shows how a society dreams and designs itself, what do our Taschereau boulevards, our bridges exhausted by traffic and our highways overloaded with increasingly obese cars say about us?
In the 1980s, economists developed the notion of path dependence (also known as the path taken) to explain the difficulties in extricating oneself from an inherited model through a “lock-in effect”, even when other paths exist. The mobility paradigm centered on the individual automobile that has triumphed for decades offers a typical case of path dependence. Active transportation solutions allowing another use of public spaces congested by more and more vehicles, electric or not, are not developing much and, if they are, it is too slowly in Quebec.
Public transport has continued to decline in North America, including in Montreal, for a century in favor of the growing importance of the automobile, with the complicity of public authorities. The United States’ Amtrak train network will carry 23 million passengers in 2022 compared to 1.2 billion people in 1920, when the continent’s trains were the most efficient in the world.
The first Shinkansen, Japan’s bullet train, began traveling at more than 500 km/h 60 years ago, in 1964. There is still no equivalent in all of the Americas. The high-frequency train project between Quebec and Toronto promised for 2030 (who believes it?) will run at a top speed of around 200 km/h, the speed of the rail cars of the first decade of the 20th century.e century…
Shall we continue the historical comparisons? At the height of Montreal’s electric tram network, in the 1930s, the 55 lines served hundreds of stations on 510 km of rail, all the way to the South Shore. The last tram was destroyed in 1959 under the pressure of the so-called modernity of all-car driving.
The Montreal metro network inaugurated in 1966 now includes 4 lines, extended over 71 km serving 68 stations. The last station added to the island was in 1988, more than 35 years ago. The metro in Madrid, a comparable city of 3.3 million inhabitants, has 13 lines and almost 300 stations totaling almost 300 km of rails.
“There is a lot of thinking to be done and tangible changes to be made to reduce the space occupied by the automobile,” says David Alfaro Clark, public and government affairs advisor for the Ordre des urbanistes du Québec. We must widen the sidewalks, create more green islands, reduce the number of traffic lanes. It’s a huge project because the public space we inherit was designed around the automobile. We still need to offer alternative solutions if we want people to abandon the car. We have a good basic public transportation network in Montreal, compared to other cities in North America, but we are clearly having difficulty developing it with all the projects that are not coming to fruition. »
However, there is no shortage of money for transport in this rich country. However, fortunes are still being spent on individual automobiles.
Trajectoire Québec, which promotes public transport, calculated that automobile transport cost Quebecers $43 billion per year. We must also add 7.6 billion for additional costs linked to public health, road safety, legal costs, etc. These astronomical sums are constantly growing (nearly 70% in twenty years) as the automobile fleet grows from year to year.
The free system without toll is an illusion. The expenses to maintain the “ motordom “, the kingdom of the “chariot”, are assumed by everyone, motorists, cyclists, scooterists or pedestrians. Each Quebec family of four pays nearly $7,000 annually in public expenses for automobile transportation.
Motorists are obviously adding more to maintain increasingly expensive vehicles, their average price at the dealership now exceeding $60,000. In total, families with a car spend approximately $20,000 on transportation, which constitutes the second largest expense in a family budget. In Montreal, the 16.4 billion in private transportation spent annually by households corresponds to ten times the annual budget of the Société de transport de Montréal.
“This system is not viable in the long term,” concludes Trajectoire Québec, which calls for slowing down the growth of the automobile fleet, establishing the user-pays principle and offering alternative solutions to citizens to get by. move more quickly and at lower cost by using in a different way all the public space now monopolized by the solo car. “The automobile fleet is currently growing faster than the population of Quebec. The transport sector is taking up an increasingly large share of public and household spending and, as things stand, the situation can only get worse. »
We can complain about the effects when we strongly criticize the causes.