Montreal’s new rail line is the future

From the article:

The REM has taken best practices from around the world and gives them a made-in-Canada twist. As in Shanghai and Taipei, you board the trains through safety-enhancing platform doors. Like most modern European networks, the trains draw power from overhead wires; this being Montreal, the rooftop pantographs that connect to the wires are reinforced to break up ice on the lines. As on Japanese commuter trains, the seats are heated for winter riding comfort. And because it’s automated, it can run trains at greater frequencies—they can arrive as often as every two and a half minutes.

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Maybe most importantly, given Canada’s cash-strapped municipal budgets, the REM is being built for a fraction of the cost of comparable projects in North America. In Toronto, the Eglinton Crosstown has swollen to $13 billion, or $684 million a kilometre. The second phase of New York’s long-overdue Second Avenue Subway may cost $3.7 billion a kilometre, and current rail expansions in San Francisco and Los Angeles have gone north of $1 billion a kilometre. The construction of a five-station extension to the all-underground Blue Line, which has just begun in Montreal’s east end, has a similar price tag. The REM is being built for $140 million a kilometre—an astonishing bargain.

How is Quebec getting so much bang for its transportation buck? Typically, governments finance existing transit agencies, giving them the licence to build and operate new lines for 30 years or so. The city of Montreal ponied up $100 million to fund the stations that connect to its metro, but this isn’t a municipal project. The REM is being built by CDPQ Infra, the construction arm of the Caisse de dépôt et placement, the manager of Quebec’s massive public pension fund, which has undertaken other infrastructure projects: Eurostar’s high-speed trains, the terminals at Heathrow airport and Vancouver’s Canada Line. CDPQ Infra has a 78 per cent equity stake in the REM and will reap revenue from the service, paid out at the rate of 75 cents per kilometre per passenger, for 99 years. From the start, it was in CDPQ’s interests to keep costs down.

It did that in part by building an elevated system, which is much cheaper than tunnelling. But it also standardized design. Historically, Canadian cities seem to reinvent the wheel every time they embark on a new transit project. That’s fun for someone like me, who enjoys a little local colour when he travels, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense if your goal is to get a lot of transit built quickly. China has constructed 11,000 kilometres of urban rail transit in the last two decades in four dozen cities. It’s done this quickly and cheaply by standardizing station and network design and mass-producing metro trains. Whether you’re in Chengdu or Guangzhou, you ride one of five standard train designs. And because lines are nationally planned and engineered, a Chinese city contemplating a new transit system doesn’t need to start from scratch—they just choose from existing templates that match their particular needs.