Montréal's REM metro is opening...kinda, sorta!
Already opening, but also opening soon, but also not opening for a while!
It’s a bit of an unusual thing for a city to have two different metro systems. With the significant cost of building and maintaining public infrastructure, you typically don’t want to duplicate the administrative overhead and reduce the economies of scale that come with larger purchase orders.
But it’s also not completely unheard of. In Tokyo, Japan, there are two metro systems run by separate agencies. Tokyo Metro operates nine lines and 180 stations over 195 kilometres of revenue track. It is a joint-stock corporation where 50% of stock is split between the Japanese Government and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and the other 50% listed publicly on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
That same Tokyo Metropolitan Government also directly owns and operates the Toei Subway, which runs four lines and 106 stations over 109 kilometres of revenue track. And in addition, there are multiple lines run by other various companies and joint ventures that are functionally metro services as well.
Thankfully, while these entities are different, Japan maintains a Nationwide Mutual Usage Service for fare cards, meaning that whether you buy your fare card from a regional train operator up in Hokkaido or south in Kyushu, or an urban metro or bus service in Nagoya or Tokyo, it will work on the vast majority of systems across Japan.
But this kind of tight coordination between many various agencies and levels of government is hard. Immense credit needs to be given to Japan for managing it as well as they have. And while Greater Montréal isn’t quite at the Greater Tokyo Area’s level of public transit complexity, it’s also doing a worse job at integration.
So let’s talk about Montréal’s second metro system, the REM. Which is somehow about to open, but already open, and also not going to be open for a while.
Prior to the REM, in Montréal after 1996 there were two main grade-separated transit services, the Montréal Métro operated by the STM (then known as the STCUM), and the AMT, which took over commuter rail operations from the former.
The Métro currently operates four metro lines, primarily known by their colours Green, Orange, Yellow, and Blue. These operate not as rail services, but as grade-separated rubber tire metros, inspired by similar lines in Paris, with the ability to climb steeper hills with their greater tractive force.
When you look at the numbers, however, you’ll see that the first three, opened between 1966 and 1967 are Lines 1, 2, and 4, with Line 5 opened in the 1980s. Where is Line 3, you may ask? The answer is the Deux-Montagnes line, a train service originally opened by CN Rail in 1918 using electric locomotives to go through a tunnel inside Mont Royal.
In the 1960s, there was a plan to turn this already-electrified passenger train into a rapid surface metro, Red Line 3. It would use normal steel-wheel metro cars rather than the rubber tire system, as the rubber tires could not work in the outdoors due to issues such as Montréal weather. However, due to difficulty in negotiations between CN Rail and the various municipalities on the island, it was delayed.
Eventually, when Montréal got the rights to host Expo 67, they built the Yellow Line 4 to the South Shore, as it was a higher priority for the swaths of international visitors who would be coming to visit the city. Various plans continued in the background, but eventually STCUM took over the Deux-Montagnes line in 1982, passing it along to AMT in 1996, where it continued until recent times.
The legacy of former Québec Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard, who led the province from 2014 to 2018, is felt in many aspects of public transportation in Greater Montréal. With Bill 76, the AMT was dissolved by the Couillard government, and replaced with two agencies. Exo took over operations of the suburban transit services formerly operated by AMT, while the ARTM took over transportation planning for Greater Montréal.
How things now work is that the ARTM plans the larger direction of an integrated transit network, as well as operating a single fare system, using the Opus card. Unlike most modern fare card systems, it does not store a cash balance; you must manually purchase a fare or a pass and load it to your card before tapping on to public transit anywhere in Greater Montréal.
This is further complicated by the fare zones. Reasonably, ARTM uses four zones for Greater Montréal, to vary your fare based on distance. GO Transit does the same thing for Southern Ontario, but it works a lot better there because you simply tap on and tap off, and it automatically deducts the necessary money from your balance.
ARTM, on the other hand, forces you to pick in advance which zones you will be using for your trip, and thus you may need to juggle several fare types based on what your travel that day looks like. If you’re staying in the proper urban agglomeration of Montréal, then you just need a zone A fare. But if you’re going to Longueuil or Laval, you enter Zone B, and the suburbs get into Zones C and D.
You have the option between Zone A, AB, ABC, or ABCD for your fare, except for the unlimited evening or weekend passes which cover all zones, and you can buy these zone fares in increments of one, two, ten, or a monthly pass. It’s not a dealbreaker, but compared to other distance-based systems it sure is annoying that you can’t just store a cash balance and have the computer do the math, like Toronto and Tokyo do.
What does ARTM do with collected fare revenue? They provide that and other funding from various sources to operators, the agencies that actually implement the policies and projects that ARTM contracts. The STM and Exo are just two examples, but there are also the public transit operators in Laval and Longueuil. Ultimately, 89% of the expenses in the ARTM budget consists of funding these service contracts with operators.
This new structure then helped set the stage for former Premier Couillard’s other major impact: placing a second metro operator in Montréal, separate from the STM and their capital-M Métro. This is what we now know as the "Réseau express métropolitain”, or more casually the “REM”.
Reviving the original plan for the Red Line 3, Couillard announced that an operator contract would be provided to CDPQ, the provincial crown corporation which manages the Québec Pension Plan and invests in provincial businesses and infrastructure, for them to build and operate what would be known as the REM, an express regional metro system. Rather than being under the purview of STM, it is a separate operator integrated with ARTM’s Opus fare system.
As such, rather than becoming the Red Line and taking the number 3, the REM is being numbered as “ligne A”, with each branch getting a separate sub-number. The YUL airport branch will be numbered A2, the branch through Pointe-Claire to Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue will be A3, and the Deux-Montagnes branch crossing through Laval will be A4. Curiously, the spur from Gare Centrale to the South Shore is called A1, despite not being a separate branch, as A2-A4 through-run from Gare Centrale onto A1.
The map above clearly demonstrates that this express metro will cover much further distances than the existing rubber tire lines, with a wider stop spacing. It uses normal Alstom Metropolis steel-wheel metro cars, two-car trains in off-peak hours and four-car trains in peak hours, powered by an electrified overhead catenary. These power wires are regularly scraped for ice by the train car itself as it passes under.
Further, unlike the STM metro, the REM has no human operator; it is fully automated to the level of GoA4, providing fully safe and reliable service run by a central computer. No need to be anxious about this; Vancouver has used a similar system for the past 40 years, and they are far more reliable than Toronto which opted for the manual human-operated version. Tokyo and Paris also use GoA4 automation systems.
This automation, which allows the train to stop precisely on the platform, enables platform screen doors, which only open when the train doors open, preventing people or objects from getting onto the tracks. Platform doors don’t just save time by preventing delays, they save lives when people are in their most desperate and vulnerable moments.
Overall, I like the REM a great deal, which is why it frustrates me that there’s the added complexity of making it a separate operator from the STM, which already runs the existing metro and bus service in Montréal. I can see the argument for converting more Exo lines to REM lines, as it is essentially a quantum leap from one-direction commuter rail to high-frequency RER service in the vein of Paris.
But there is no interest from Québec to fund such a thing. A “REM de l’Est” which would have provided relief to the crowded Green Line 1 was cancelled after public protest towards elevated rail by misguided NIMBYs.
Now, rather than an elevated automated metro with good service and good capacity, Montréal is throwing themselves into the same stupidity as Toronto, with a plan to instead build a lower capacity tram line which will provide worse service than any metro, crossing lanes of car traffic.
And unfortunately, public opinion has partially turned on the REM due to growing pains with the system’s very gradual rollout. The A1 branch, from Gare Centrale to the South Shore, opened on July 31st, 2023. But the rest of the system was supposed to open in 2024, and then in 2024, it was supposed to open in 2025. Earlier this year, technical issues plagued the system, causing service disruptions and reducing public confidence in the network with an extended closure.
But we’ve all heard the news, right? The REM is finally about to open, right?
Kinda sorta. The A1 branch to the South Shore has already been open for over two years. The A4 branch to Deux-Montagnes is opening in a couple of weeks on November 17th. But the other branches? A3 to the West Island is now delayed again to Spring 2026, and the A2 branch to serve YUL airport won’t open until 2027.
The entire purpose of the ARTM is to be a provincial agency with the mandate to coordinate all of these things at a larger scale. It’s fine to hand out operator contracts, but contracting out too much of your responsibilities results in losing control over operations and looser integration between operators.
Yet with multiple private companies, Japan has somehow figured out tighter integration than Canada does with government-run services. And Montréal is not Tokyo. It does not have any excuses for doing a worse job when the task is far less challenging. When you have the benefit of a government mandate to centrally plan infrastructure, you need to actually plan. You need to make the system feel like a cohesive whole.
And right now, ARTM has not done so. They’re trying, clearly, but the current approach is hitting a wall, and the jurisdictional disputes of federalism do not help, although again, Japan also has to handle this between the national and prefectural governments.
So I don’t care whether ARTM or CDPQ or STM are the ones to get the REM up and running as part of a cohesive system, and neither do most Montréalers. We just want the train to be open, and to run on time.
I’m glad that so many stations will come with this “opening” of the REM…but it’s also been “open” for two years, and it’s also not going to be “open” for two more years. So excuse my skepticism, but I do think that there’s a fair bit to do in Greater Montréal before I’m fully confident in their public transit network.