Agreed.
However Quebec has seen an exception to that with the REM because it’s taking from the public to finance an investment fund. So the government gave a whole public train line and is choking the rest of the public train network.
In essence, Philippe Couillard and Denis Coderre started the slow privatization of the public transit network in Montreal by giving public assets and carte blanche to an investment entity that’s gonna charge the public transit entity fees for every passenger using its new network. And the public transit entity cannot compete against the investment one, by law.
So obviously, being for profit and for ‘friends’, the project went ahead at record speed.
That sounds like a sweetheart deal that’ll comeback to bite the STM in the coming years. Definitely Quebec is a somewhat refreshing edge case that proves that transit can be built fast, though it feels like it would be difficult to replicate on a level of building/rehabilitating several hundreds of kilometres of rail running between multiple city centres.
