It only took 30 years of talking about it, 5 years of construction, and $745 million, but the 3 Laval metro stations are finally opening to the public this weekend.
Will it be worth it? The stations will really only conveniently serve people in Laval-des-Rapides, and the cost of a monthly pass will be prohibitively high:
$750 million in new transit infrastructure spending would be spent more wisely elsewhere.
“No serious cost-benefit analysis would have given the Laval metro top priority,” he said. “Dorval would have come first” – meaning improved transit and road links between downtown and Trudeau airport in Dorval.
Other higher priorities, by purely objective criteria, would have included improving mobility along the Metropolitan Expressway corridor or extending the metro’s Blue Line east to the Anjou area, Galella said.
Still, it’s nice to finally see a project move from “Hell-Freezes-Over” status to complete, whatever its faults. Maybe this means there’s still hope for other projects, like finishing highway 30. Or fixing the potholes. Or even extending Cavendish. (Yeah, right!)
And what to say of the fact they “forgot” to calulate more than a kilometer of tunnel?
How can planners simply “forget” a whole kilometer of tunnel?
Subways work best where population is more dense. West of Decarie there isn’t any métro at all. Yet, how many people live in NDG, Mtl W., C.S.L., Hampstead compared to laval and what are the comparative population densities?
One almost gets the impression that these areas have no subway because the people living there don’t speak the right language.
One more thing, I live close to a station on the orange line. On the days I use it I sometimes have to let two trains pass before one arrives with some space. Now that Laval is linked, though, how many more trains will people “downstream” ( say at Métro Laurier) have to let pass before one shows up with even minimal standing room?
A very unwise use of funds, if you ask me.