Hm these maps seem way more balanced than v3 as well as my edits, really nice work there! Though I do still have some comments xD
I’m gonna start from the reduced version then build my way up to the full map because many of my suggestions involve adding buses. My recommendations result in a level of service sort of “in between” the full map and the reduced map. I’ll post a version of the reduced map with my suggestions, plus a couple of the coverage buses from the full map.
Granted, with the eventual removal of the 968 route, the eventual addition of 50 buses to the SL garage (something like a 17ish % increase from what we have now), and that in your map many routes to the metro are either trimmed or straight-up deleted (211 405 409 411 425 468 470 475 485 and, technically, 747… that’s quite a few, and works out to a hell of a lot of extra bus “resources” we can work with), its not impossible to see several frequent routes come by after the reform (but in the real world the STM doesnt give a crap about the west island and they’ll probably . That said, I’ll try not to add too many routes to the reduced version.
One immediate concern I see in this map is that, while of course I understand that it is reasonable, in fact even preferable for access to the metro will be reduced following the REM being put into service, but what I’m seeing here seems somewhat overdone. I’m particularly worried about getting to the cote vertu/du college area, as there is still substantial need for commuters to go from the west island to those areas (eg vanier college, workplaces on decarie/cote des neiges, etc). Currently, just about everyone is able to either take a bus to fairview then 470 to CV, or could take bus 68 to bus 64. With both of those options gone, a substantial number of people will need at minimum 3 buses to get to cote vertu metro (or bus-REM-bus). With transfer wait times still being up to 30min for most lines this can make the experience of going to CV deeply unpleasant, unless the REM gets extended to bois-franc (unlikely to happen soon tbh). I’ll try to address this problem in my suggestions below.
Speaking of… here’s a few of my suggestions/brain farts:
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In my personal opinion, 201/68 to me really needs to be merged into one line.
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There are some shops and commerces along gouin that I’d love to maintain easy access to, and beyond that, the 68 is generally the primary way to go from the west island to laval, montreal-nord, parts of eastern montreal, st laurent, and CDN by transferring to either 64 or 69 then again to either the metro or some third bus. While it’s not often that these trips are made, I really don’t want to entertain the idea of upping that to 4 buses (or 3+metro) for people who do need to make these sorts of trips as at that point id just tell them to drive, itd would no longer be worth the hours in wait times per day.
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Id personally keep the high frequency route all the way down: if we combine the 68, and 468 routes then one can argue that we currently have an effective all-day frequency of 15 minutes on that corridor on weekdays (2 buses per hour on 68 + 2 buses per hour on 468), so it’s not like it’s unreasonable to maintain a 15 minute all-day frequency down the corridor; a drop to 30min service east of Roxboro would indeed be a downgrade from what we have now. Id even go a step further and extend this 201/68 down grenet to CV tbh to make up for losing so many other buses from pierrefonds to CV/du college: the 409, 468, and 470. That second extension might be asking a little much but it would make a lot of difference in terms of access to not-quite-downtown destinations on the island.
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This largely solves the problem of metro access as with 68/201 now running on st charles, basically the entire west island can take a bus to the 68/201 then take 68/201 to the metro (via 64 if the extension isn’t done). Thus we maintain the ability for people to take 2 buses to Cote Vertu.
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Admittedly im not entirely sure why 217 and 216 are separate routes, especially in the full map. I recall your access vs speed point from earlier and I fully agree with it, but here it seems like the 217 doesnt have proper access to fairview either, and the 216 just picks up where 217 leaves off anyways. 217 does extend past des sources presumably to do the route of the old 72 but i’d argue that 72 is best left untouched anyways since it serves its industrial areas rather well while providing very good connections: to the REM at sources and marie-curie (technoparc), to the metro at cote vertu/du college, and to other bus lines at fairview and sources.
- Id like to propose that 216/217 be one route, with a detour at des Sources to exit the highway, drop off/pick up people at the rem, and then join back the highway. The 217 east of sources should, honestly, just be the old 72 tbh. And at Fairview i wanna say lets have pointe claire build a simple, cheap pedestrian bridge/tunnel at Fairview to connect the westbound service road to the REM. they did it for every exo1 stop in their territory, even the really tiny/unimportant stops, so I’m sure it can’t be expensive to do here as well (and it would be much more useful here than there) so it’s really not too unreasonable an idea IMHO.
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I’ve been thinking about the 211 and 411 a bit. I really like your suggestion of keeping just 411 btw, I think it works quite well. That said I think both routes need to be frequent, as @HenryM mentioned, but doing it the way it’s done in the “full” map has a frequent 211 overlapping with a frequent 201/68 on southern st charles… this seems kinda overkill: they’ll have the most buses per hour despite being of the least busy corridors and one of the lowest density areas in the west island (at least as of right now but it seems that the area isn’t a target for building mid-to-high rise housing; that seems to mostly be taking place north of A40 for now).
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One observation i want to make is I don’t think hymus needs a frequent-all-day route down its length. Most of the shopping on hymus is concentrated to the corners of hymus and one of the north-south boulevards st jean, etc. meaning that those shopping areas will be accessible by one of the 201/68, 302, or 209 frequent bus lines. Instead, what’s on hymus between the boulevards is mostly industrial areas which, to me, do not warrant all-day frequent service by themselves. Instead, a 30min all-day service with slightly enhanced rush hour to 20-min should be sufficient and will leave us with more room to adjust other routes’ frequencies. To make sure, I did a quick walk-down on google maps’ street view and struggled to find anything of interest on Hymus except the hospital and some condos around the hymus/delmar interesection.
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To fix the overlapping st charles routes and if we run with the assumption that Hymus won’t need a high frequency route, then what I want to suggest is essentially this: let’s take the current 405 which is exactly the same as the 411 from our map and the 211 from our map (west of beaconsfield) and run it at thick line frequencies (10 min rush hour/15 min off peak). This provides us the 211 and 411 service in the current “full” map while also saving us some resources by not running frequent buses down st charles and hymus.
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Now we can add a standard service bus on hymus, let’s call it 225 cuz why not. Let’s start it at kirkland REM and move eastwards to st charles, where it’ll go to hymus. By having it just go straight down hymus we can put the 215 back to its current route so that it serves st regis. Then finally the 214 can be moved from st regis to spring garden to provide better coverage to that part of eastern DDO (IMHO the bus will serve more ppl on spring garden than sunnybrooke since sunnybrooke runs along the nature park).
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(one thing to note as an aside is since 215 and 225 buses also serve the st laurent areas which aren’t really targeted by the west island reform, it might be prudent to leave the portions of them east of a40 as-is as well as their numbers)
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Route 202 duplicating 203 for the entire length from st jean/beaconsfield to the western terminus seems a bit overkill. Generally I don’t like route concurrency because, at least in the west island, the buses somehow always end up running very close to one another, leading to a fairly staggered frequency experience. Assuming route 203 is intended to be a high frequency route (10 min peak/15 min all-day) and with 211 to reduce the overall importance of needing the 202 to go to fairview Im thinking the 202 should instead do that part of “thin line” 203 west of st jean/lakeview
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With Kirkland becoming at this point a sorta mini terminus I feel like it can be justifiable to extend 419 to there to meet the rest of the buses for better bus-bus transfers
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Last and probably least, I think the 209 should stay extended to the airport like it is right now. I think this is good for two reasons:
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If the CDPQ wont extend REM to dorval then we may as well do it ourselves. A high frequency bus from dorval to the airport obviously isn’t a proper replacement for a REM extension but at least it means dorval residents who want access to the REM have a not-too-terrible way to access it. Airport surcharges may throw a wrench in that idea but im hoping on it being the same as today where like how you can use 747 with your monthly pass, you can hopefully use REM to the airport with it as well.
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It provides an alternative way to get to the airport from the west island. REM loses points in that regard because you have to do a 10+ minute ride alll the way to bois franc, wait up to 10-15 minutes, then do another 10 minute ride back to the airport… yeah transfers between REM branches is gonna be a proper pain in the butt because of that, it seems they really built it with a strong “go downtown and back” mentality. Anyways, In some situations the REM is still faster than transferring to the 209 but especially for people who live more south in dorval/pointe-claire/etc it’s probably easier for them to take 411/405 to dorval then 209 to the airport than to deal with the REM.
One quick thing to mention is in my map i did some slight adjustments to route, most noticeably 205, 206, and 214. The changes largely concern making the routes more closely follow existing routes, both to not accidentally leave people bus-less but also because IMO the areas I adjusted have better coverage (you mapped some routes to run alongside a40, the river, or the nature park which cut down how many people the bus passes by since one side becomes just “nothingness” in a way). I also integrated your fill map’s 214 “detour” to kirkland road into my edit’s 225 to get that coverage boost. I didn’t
BTW I really, really love the other changes.
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The extended 203 makes a lot of sense to me, providing similar service as the old 470 to connect Pierrefonds to the main shopping center at Fairview. And especially with a bus-only road going to be built from antoine-faucon to the REM, it’s almost a no-brainer that we need high frequency buses on that road (else itll be a waste to build the road it it receives little use) so I’m quite happy that it’s accounted for.
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The 205 loop seems quite sensible, avoiding overlap with other routes while connecting both anselme lavigne and pavillon to the REM. Just the part around rive-boisee, i’d change it to the more “original” route instead to provide better coverage though.
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And in the full map, I never thought to consider a bus like 210 down fredmir and tecumseh but it looks like a really solid and not annoyingly twisty/windy way to add coverage to the area which is otherwise devoid of nice, direct streets. I left it out of
To address @Aricie’s idea of 468 on pierrefonds->roxboro REM-> des sources, it’s certainly not a stupid idea, it’s actually quite sensible since it provides for a decent way to go from pierrefonds to the shipping areas on des Sources. However I don’t think it should be done for the sake of frequency, since having multiple lines overlap in my experience tends to end up with a staggered frequency… let’s take the current 68 and 468 for exampe, both come every half hour but often the 468 comes 5 min after the 68 (or vice versa) or even worse ive seen both buses basically bumper-to-bumper providing what’s at that point an 80’ bus experience every half hour. For that reason i prefer single, high frequency routes over multiple, low frequency, overlapping routes.
