A Rapid Bus Line and a Taste of Bliss.
A good bus improvement project and some potential improvements on it.
I was recently in Montreal, and I finally got some time to walk the whole of the Pie-IX BRT (that’s pronounced “pee-noof” if you’re not familiar with Montreal). The project has been underway for a long time and is finally mostly open, although it’s fallen mostly under the radar with the REM opening this year.
The Pie-IX BRT is a lot like other contemporary North American BRT projects such as San Francisco’s Van Ness BRT and the Viva BRT’s in greater Toronto — a centre-running route with enhanced stops, signal priority, and all-door boarding, as well as a rebuilt and nicely landscaped street.
What is the Pie-IX BRT?
Pie-IX in particular is an 11-kilometre route (which is getting extended a little further to the southeast) that runs for essentially the whole length of Pie-IX boulevard on the island of Montreal and across the Prairies river into Laval. While it was under construction, Pie-IX created a ton of disruption and took years because — as tends to be the case with these projects — the creation of the BRT came along with a total reconstruction of the road and the subsurface utilities.
There’s a real case to be made that projects like this should happen independent of utility replacement. While utility replacement is good in theory, it often ends up sneaking in as part of the transit budget. Since the public usually isn’t cool with nonfunctioning power and water, it’s probably a good idea not to include work on those services using limited transit funds. This is an example of what Alon Levy calls the other people’s money problem.
Fortunately, this at least means the BRT route will (hopefully) be open for a long time before any kind of closure is needed for infrastructure work, trying to minimize disruption to riders — and a very bad regression in level of service.
Another element of the route I quite like is the understated but smart branding of the route with a diamond — which is the symbol typically used to mark HOV and bus lanes in Canada and the US. The stops themselves are really good: they aren’t over the top like the stops on VIVA, and yet the provide good protection from the elements, including glass screens with gaps where bus doors open, large maps, and nice next bus screens. Even better, the stop at Jean Talon, which will connect to the future Blue line extension, will actually have a direct connection to the metro from the bus platforms — much like at Vaughan Metropolitan Centre VIVA stop in the Toronto region.
On top of all of this, there have been streetscape improvements: the streets were fully repaved, meaning travel is smoother than on the average Montreal street, and sidewalks were widened. There’s also some nice new green landscaping added to the centre of the street.
And all of these elements come together so that the Pie-IX BRT works really well — it’s blissful even. Buses move pretty quickly, and even more importantly I saw them frequently overtaking cars in clogged up traffic — there is seldom a better advertisement for public transport. The nice stops are also a huge blessing that make bus travel in Montreal winters just a little more pleasant — it’s amazing how often bus stops on busy bus routes are undersized, and that’s an especially big problem in places with crappy weather.
In many ways, I think the current layout on Pie-IX should be the default layout for new and rebuilt arterial roads, and something we actively convert any major street with a busy bus route to. It’s ultimately a good way to improve the speed and reliability of long and busy bus routes, and thus also controlling operating costs. The other nice thing about the way the Pie-IX BRT is configured is that it was used by multiple agencies from the beginning, and its branding cements that — the BRT is underlying infrastructure, not something belonging to a particular agency, and that highlights that it can and should be used to enhance any public transport service it can — which is deeply underrated.
Room for improvement.
While the Pie-IX BRT does have a relatively frequent service, it could be a lot better — every 10-12 minutes on a weekend isn’t great but that’s the kind of wait I experienced. Services on a BRT route should never be more than 10 minutes apart, and if that means scheduling them even more frequently then so be it. Service should also run 24/7 — if a route justifies a BRT, it also deserves a night bus route that can make use of the infrastructure for the BRT.
I also think it’s important that transit agencies continue to be encouraged to make maximal use of that infrastructure. Things are already pretty good with STM, STL, and EXO all using the BRT for part of its length (longer-distance EXO buses being able to use the BRT as a rapid urban connection is extremely valuable), but I’d like to see even more — with EXO running some extra express services that could skip stops and provide urban journeys, though I am sure that would lead to a battle with the STM.
There’s also an issue seen on Pie-IX that is sort of a general problem with these recent BRTs: tons of money spent reconfiguring the street and still not providing excellent cycling and walking facilities. In Montreal’s case, sidewalks were widened, but a much more drastic street redesign would have been appreciated with a REV bike path and big pedestrian spaces. Enclosed bike storage also seems like a no-brainer for Montreal transit facilities and not putting them on a street corner or in a plaza near a stop or station is a miss.
It’s also pretty clear that a route like this should use electric buses, and the optimal option would have been electric trolley buses given the complete street redesign, but the STM’s website says they didn’t do that because of cost and conflicts with municipal underground systems. This seems like a made-up excuse because the whole reason the project took so long was utility relocation, and for what it’s worth the poles used to support trolley wires in Vancouver or Toronto do not look substantially different than what Montreal already has! I imagine the real issue is the horrible transit costs problem rearing its ugly head again, as the Pie-IX BRT was already an over half-a-billion dollar project without trolleys.
What I think would really take the Pie-IX route to the next level though would be creating more routes like it that could create an express bus network for the city as opposed to a single corridor. As Pie-IX serves a route in east Montreal that parallels both Orange line legs and the REM, I like the idea of another BRT paralleling the Green and Blue lines, perhaps as an upgrade of the dedicated bus lanes on Sauve and Côte-Vertu, which could run about 9 kilometres from Côte-Vertu Metro to Pie-IX (with a slight diversion on Industrial Boulevard for the last leg). Such a leg would connect several rapid transit stations and the existing BRT, and would also provide more network redundancy and the ability to run an orbital service through urban parts of Montreal from Pie-IX onto Sauve. What’s clear is that any BRT routes should be planned with trolley wires in their future, as this creates a natural “trunk” for future battery range-extended trolleys to run on and charge before splitting off to serve areas near the corridors.
At the end of the day, projects like the Pie-IX BRT should be pretty easy and cost-effective, and getting them there and maximizing their benefits means building far more.
I live and work on the west island so I have no need to use this BRT but I have been meaning to go and check it out just the same. I do like your idea of additional BRT lanes to expand this network. The idea of increasing frequency is also good; though, operating budgets are not getting improved due to the CAQ preferring cars over transit, so it is doubtful we'll see an increased frequency, better weekend or overnight service any time soon.
Excellent article, Reece! I agree that the Pie-IX BRT does a great job of allowing buses to travel fast and unimpeded by car traffic.
What disappoints me about it is that is was presented as a transformative mega-project and that it took 13 years to complete from the time it was first announced in 2009, when in reality it’s just articulated buses travelling in dedicated lanes.
It was promised that the Pie-IX BRT would be just like a metro, but with buses. In reality, while the buses on the Pie-IX BRT are frequent at peak hours on weekdays, off-peak they come less frequently than the metro. And on weekends, the 439 on the Pie-IX BRT is only in service from 8am to 6pm! This will hopefully be changed soon, but it goes without saying that having no service after 6pm on weekends is crazy and is absolutely not “like a metro, but with buses”.
The fact that the BRT stations have no ticket machines is also disappointing. And considering how much time and money has gone into this project, I think ticket machines at every station, off-board payment, and real level-boarding (without the need to deploy a ramp to allow wheelchair users to get on the bus) would have been great to include.