MONTREAL — On a recent mid-afternoon ride of Montreal’s brand-new light rail system, straphangers outnumbered joyriders taking in the stretch between the city and the suburb of Brossard, Que. A gaggle of children counted dead mosquitos on the train’s front window. A man fiddled on his phone. “Where are people supposed to park?” a woman asked her husband as we pulled into Panama, the aspirationally-named station on Montreal’s South Shore. 

It is perhaps the best compliment for the Réseau express métropolitain (REM), or any public transportation project: though it has been open to the public for all of two weeks, it already has the makings of seamless, humdrum reality.

The implications of this seamlessness are more profound than they seem at a glance. Until now, leaving the island of Montreal has almost always meant traffic snarls, wasted time and the nagging feeling you’re doing no one any good by sitting on a road in an idling car. With the REM, you can be farmfield-adjacent from downtown in 18 minutes. 

Only about 17 kilometres of the REM is currently open. In a couple of years—give or take, of course—the REM will resemble a 67-kilometre crow’s foot with talons in the North Shore, the West Island and Trudeau airport. The REM flies past traditional island city hindrances like traffic and waterways. What effect, then, will one of the country’s biggest public transportation projects in a generation have on the city it serves?

The answer might lie beneath the city itself. In 1966, Montrealers stepped into the initial 20 stations of the Metro for the first time. Over the next four decades, the Metro evolved into a 69-kilometre labyrinth spanning the city and its north and south shores, and the Smurf-coloured, rubber-wheeled trains rolled into the city’s history and mythology. Above ground, some of the Metro’s effects on the landscape were banal. Plunking stops into already-densely-populated areas simply made those areas… more dense. Yet other effects were transformative, and suggest that, with the REM, Montreal is in for massive change.

Take the city’s downtown core. As Benoit Clairoux explained to me, the acres of booze cans, bordellos, showbars, steakhouses and department stores that once constituted downtown Montreal began in the southern part of the city and ended at Ste-Catherine Street to the north. Clairoux, a spokesperson for the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) and arguably the city’s preeminent amateur Metro historian, said the subway effectively shifted this core northward to include Maisonneuve Boulevard, along which the Metro was built. 

“There was a new downtown Montreal,” Clairoux told me. (In a delightfully Montrealian twist, the STM has exactly nothing to do with the building and operation of the REM, and the two are often at odds over which organization has the right to be schlepping people around.)

The new downtown meant the City of Montreal found itself in the real estate game, selling air rights above nascent Metro stations. “In a large city, the value of a site in the central area is perhaps five, ten and even a hundred times the value of a site in the suburbs, simply because it can be reached quickly and easily by a very large number of people,” reads a mid-60s transit authority brochure. And build they did: The IBM Tower, 1000 de la Gauchetière, the Bell Centre are among the many skyscrapers built between the downtown tranches of the Metro’s green and orange lines in the last half-century, in many cases with their own direct entrances to underground stations. 

With the Metro’s expansion to Laval, Que., in 2007, farmland and industrial clutter bloomed into a kind of downtownish suburbia. It’s not my cup of tea, but it worked. Density went up and car use went down. Notably, property values shot up even before the line was completed. 

The REM promises a similar effect. So valuable has the real estate around the tracks become that any building constructed up to one kilometre from its stations is taxed extra for the privilege. This hasn’t stopped developers, who are flocking to the REM’s footprint. 

Suburbanites jumped into the mix to complain, predictably enough, about the dearth of parking spaces. Residents of Pointe Claire, home to two REM stations and many mansions, are worried that densification will spoil the bucolic atmosphere that defines their community.

And anyone frustrated with the REM’s societal impacts, noise, cost, or just that the damn thing isn’t getting built fast enough, has had a ready outlet in the Journal de Montréal, which has reported extensively on its supposed shortcomings.

Yet the REM, like the Metro a generation ago, is already a normality. Sure, you can complain about it. But you’re better off sitting back and enjoying the ride.

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.” @MartinPatriquin