It was one of Valerie Plante’s central promises during the election campaign: to debut a new metro line connecting the city’s Southwest borough to the Northeast.
Today, Quebec’s Transport Minister announced that his ministry is investing a total of 15 million dollars into feasibility studies for the proposed line, alone with eight more projects covering Montreal, Laval, the North Shore, and the South Shore.
But the cities, ultimately, will decide which projects they want to prioritize.
“We want a structure where the municipal officials behind me are the ones making the decisions – decisions that are based on expert testimony, based on facts, based on numbers, on ridership,” Andre Fortin told reporters Wednesday.
The Mayor of Montreal will be pitching an extension to the projected reserved bus lane on Pie-IX Boulevard, and a new bus lane on Notre-Dame.
Of course, the pink line will also be up for discussion, though Plante says she’s ready to accept alternative scenarios if that’s what the studies suggest.
“The reason I’ve been fighting for the pink line is that there’s so much pressure on the orange line,” Plante explained. “That being said, there might be other ways to also take pressure off and this is a good conversation.”
In Laval, the administration will push for a westbound extension of the orange line, which currently stops at Montmorency on the North Shore.
Mayors will push for a conversion of the newly constructed regional train line into a system compatible with the much faster REM network – for which construction is about to start.
In Longueuil, Mayor Sylvie Parent wants an extension of the yellow line.
Quebec’s Minister of Transport will look at the results of the studies when they start coming out in the next 18 months, but there are no guarantees that any of them will see the light of day.
The government in place will look at those studies, then decide which one- if any – will get the green light.
