
REM operator told to step up as it drops out of South Shore transit project
CBC
With Montreal's light-rail train network coming off a streak of four outages in as many days, Quebec's transport minister is calling on the group overseeing the service to step up its game.
Last Wednesday, the Réseau express métropolitain (REM), which connects downtown Montreal to the city of Brossard on the South Shore, shut down for 45 minutes in both directions during afternoon rush hour.
On Thursday, the service slowdown was due to a problem with one of the landing doors at a station. The next day, a broken piece of equipment was to blame.
On Saturday, a de-icing operation on the Champlain Bridge halted the REM service for two hours.
There have been many service slowdowns on the REM since it launched, including a rocky inaugural week.
On Monday, the office of the province's transport minister had a message for CDPQ Infra, which is the REM's developer and a subsidiary of Quebec's pension fund manager, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec.
In order to encourage people to leave their cars and use public transit, "our public transit networks need to be working," reads a statement from the office of Quebec Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault.
"The problems from the last six months need to be taken seriously," the minister's office wrote.
Since last summer, there has also been frustration about sloppy communication during outages, something CDPQ Infra vowed to improve last month.
On several occasions, the group behind the REM has said that such a large public transit system is bound to have some issues after launching.
The winter season was always expected to be the new service's biggest test.
So far, the month of January has been challenging, said Jean-Marc Arbaud, the president and CEO of CDPQ Infra.
He said some of the service interruptions have lasted too long.
"To me, it's unacceptable and the number of problematic events like these, long outages like these, should be close to zero. We should not be having any of them," Arbaud told Radio-Canada.