A group of mobility organizations deplores the Legault government’s “slowness” in presenting a plan to reform the financing model for public transport, a plan to which Minister Geneviève Guilbault has nonetheless expressed openness.
Posted at 11:00 am
“There is still time to prevent the worst,” says a letter published late Tuesday morning by the TRANSIT alliance, which is committed to better financing of public transport.
The coalition, made up of experts, organizations defending users’ rights and civil society actors, reiterates that Quebec must quickly announce its intentions to fund all ground transportation while its main source of revenue, the gasoline tax, is stagnant and in decline expected to decrease in the coming years”.
Not only is the funding lacking, but it is also declining, which leads to “avoidable” cuts in benefits, insist the members of the association. The most recent example, they say, is the cancellation of Société de Transport de Montréal’s (STM) bus service “every 10 minutes or less” on the eight lines that still offered this service during rush hour.
“There is an emergency in the short and medium term, we have to move much faster,” stresses the transport manager of the Montreal Regional Council for the Environment (CRE-MTL), Blaise Rémillard, whose group is a member of the Alliance. In particular, Mr Rémillard regrets “not having had any particular signal from the government on this dossier, urgent as it may be”.
In December, La Presse reported that the shortfall in public transport finances caused by the pandemic could reach 900 million within five years, according to the Association du transport urbain du Québec (ATUQ). The Regional Metropolitan Transport Authority (ARTM) alone is missing 500 million and the STM is almost 80 million short. Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault conceded that “in the long run we cannot operate like this from year to year with emergency aid at the last minute”.
What measures in the short term?
According to Florence Junca-Adenot, professor in the Department of Urban and Tourism Studies at UQAM and expert member of the Alliance, pending a more comprehensive overhaul of the funding model, the Legault government can take four immediate actions.
These include: “Put in new emergency aid, increase the gas tax rate, which hasn’t been increased since 2013, compensate the Montreal Metropolitan Community (CMM) for SAAQ’s inability to collect vehicle registration tax across its territory, […] then authorize the ARTM to add two or three cents to the gas tax,” she explains.
At Trajectoire Québec, general manager Sarah V. Doyon reiterates that governments must now “take into account the fact that teleworking leads to less structured and therefore more expensive travel”. “This is an opportunity to offer public transport that meets all travel needs, not just commuting. Public transport is far from empty. What is unacceptable is that buses and subways have to have overcapacity in order to balance transport company budgets,” she illustrates.
The TRANSIT Alliance plans to unveil a range of solutions to better finance the industry “in the coming weeks” as part of the Ministry of Transport du Québec’s (MTQ) Working Group on Financing Sustainable Mobility. “Our recommendations will make it possible not only to ensure the maintenance of existing services, but also to finance increases in the capacity, quality and coverage of public transport networks,” affirms the coalition’s main coordinator, Samuel Pagé-Splash.
Asked for a reaction, Minister Guilbault assured on Tuesday that she was “fully aware of the challenges related to the financing of public transport”. “This is a priority for the minister and one she is already focusing on. She is in regular contact with elected community representatives from the different regions of Quebec. We are aware that we need a permanent solution for the financing of public transport,” emphasized his spokesman Louis-Julien Dufresne.
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