There is a special comedy in a transit fare system that makes distance feel less important than invisible cartography.
One may travel a generous distance within Montréal and remain, administratively speaking, safe. Zone A holds you in its warm municipal arms. Then one crosses a line — perhaps by very little, perhaps by one station, perhaps by the kind of distance that would not impress a cyclist, a crow, or a person with tolerable shoes — and the fare changes character. The trip is no longer merely a trip. It is now interzonal.
The fare has discovered geography.
The ARTM divides the metropolitan region into zones: A for the agglomeration of Montréal, B for Laval and Longueuil, C for the northern and southern suburbs, and D beyond the ARTM limit [1]. In practice, this means that a ride contained inside Zone A uses one fare, while a ride from Montréal to Laval or Longueuil requires an All Modes AB fare [2]. A regular one-trip All Modes A fare is $3.75; a regular one-trip All Modes AB fare is $5.00 [3]. A monthly All Modes A pass is $104.50; a monthly All Modes AB pass is $164.50 [4].
This is not the worst thing ever designed. That honour remains contested. But it is a strange thing to experience on a metro system, where the passenger does not feel the boundary as distance, gradient, operating cost, or revelation. One station is one station until the fare table declares otherwise.
The trouble with zones is not that they are irrational. They are often very rational from the point of view of agencies, budgets, municipalities, and funding agreements, which is to say from the point of view of everything except the person standing at the machine trying to go somewhere. Zones are administratively tidy. Trips are not.
Other cities have chosen different evasions of the problem.
New York, with characteristic bluntness, mostly says: pay once and go. The subway fare is flat. One can ride a little or a lot; the gate does not ask for an autobiography at the exit [5]. Seoul and Tokyo take another route. They make distance matter, but they let the card do the arithmetic. Tap in, tap out, and the system calculates what is owed [6][7]. Toronto, after many years of regional fare indignity, now has a One Fare program so riders can transfer between the TTC and several surrounding transit systems without paying a second local fare [8].
None of these systems is perfect. Perfection is not generally available in transit, or government, or life. But they point to a simple principle: the fare should feel like payment for movement, not punishment for crossing an administrative seam.
Montréal’s fare zones may be defensible on paper. On the platform, they can feel petty.
Then there is the phone.
A city may be forgiven for many things. Snow. Road work. Orange cones. A metro announcement that sounds as though it was recorded inside a cabinet. But there comes a point at which asking people to maintain a plastic transit card, reload it through an app, remember which zone they are entering, and select the correct fare product before moving through a turnstile begins to feel less like public transport and more like a small administrative hazing ritual.
This would be easier to accept if the technology were mysterious.
It is not.
In Laval, the STL already accepts contactless payment on buses. Riders can pay a regular single fare with a credit card, debit card, or mobile wallet, including payment by smartphone or smartwatch [9]. STL and ARTM announced in June 2023 that Interac Debit contactless payment was available on STL buses, calling it a first in Quebec. The same announcement noted that credit-card payment had already been rolled out across all STL buses in March 2022, and that the terminals were compatible with smartphones and smartwatches [10].
So the phone, it seems, is not an impossible object. It has been sighted in the wild.
The broader Montréal system, meanwhile, approaches the same idea with the solemn caution of a museum handling a vase. ARTM’s Concerto project is a $146-million modernization of the region’s fare collection system, involving more than 12,000 pieces of equipment across multiple transit territories and operators [11]. The new system is supposed to support contactless bank cards, smartphones, smart cards, and mobile tickets [11]. Several deliverables have started to appear: since 2024, OPUS users have been able to reload their physical cards through the Chrono app; virtual fares on smartphones are being tested; and bank-card and mobile-device payments are to be introduced in stages [11].
This is progress, technically. It is also the sort of progress one announces when the rest of the world has already passed through the gate.
ARTM’s Android virtual-fare guide shows the lingering awkwardness. To buy a virtual fare, the rider selects the zones they will travel through, then chooses the transportation mode, then chooses the fare [12]. The phone is modern; the mental model remains a fare vending machine that has learned to glow.
The result is that Montréal has managed to make phone payment feel like a digitized version of the old problem. A rider does not simply tap and let the system work out the rest. The rider must know the zone, the fare family, the mode, and whether the trip has crossed from the safe inner kingdom of A into the more expensive theological territory of AB.
Other places have solved this with less ritual. New York’s OMNY lets riders tap a contactless credit or debit card, smartphone, wearable, or OMNY card at subway turnstiles and on buses, with weekly fare capping applied automatically when the same card or device is used [13]. PRESTO in the Toronto region lets riders pay directly with a contactless debit or credit card in a mobile wallet — tap the phone or watch, and the fare system does the unromantic work of being a fare system [14]. Toronto’s One Fare program also lets riders transfer between the TTC and regional transit partners without paying a second local fare when using PRESTO, debit, or credit payment media [15].
This is the part that makes the zone system feel especially absurd. If a system insists that every rider choose the correct fare product before the trip begins, then every boundary becomes a customer-service problem. If a system instead treats the tap as the start of an account-based calculation, the boundary can become backend logic. The machine can remember where the trip began. The machine can apply the rule. The machine can, in a moment of rare institutional usefulness, spare the human being from becoming a fare-policy analyst before breakfast.
One should not overstate this. Fare integration is hard. Regional agencies have different budgets, operators, revenue rules, reduced fares, transfers, concessions, validators, legacy equipment, political masters, and procurement histories. A zone system is not, by itself, proof of incompetence. It is simply a structure that makes user-friendly payment harder than it needs to be when paired with a fare-product system that still asks the rider to know too much in advance.
But the comedy remains.
Laval buses can take a phone. New York can take a phone. Toronto can take a phone. Tokyo and Seoul can calculate distance without asking the rider to memorize a cartographic catechism. Montréal, meanwhile, has arrived at the future by asking Android users to test virtual fares through an app, while the rest of us continue to perform the traditional dance: card, machine, zone, product, reload, validate, hope.
One is tempted, in moments of weakness, to mutter darkly about procurement, governance, consultants, and the mysterious civic art of making already-proven technology expensive and slow.
This is probably unfair.
Probably.
The more charitable explanation is that Montréal is not late because the phone is difficult. It is late because the fare system underneath the phone is difficult, and because institutions are very good at preserving difficulty once it has acquired committees.
Then there is the other matter: the platform itself.
A metro platform is one of those urban spaces where ordinary trust is required. We stand near a void. A train arrives at speed. The system works because everyone behaves, because no one slips, because no one is pushed, because no one is in despair, because the edge remains only an edge and not an invitation, accident, or weapon.
This is an astonishing amount of faith to place in paint.
Platform screen doors are not science fiction. They are not speculative infrastructure from a more advanced civilization. Seoul installed them across its subway system years ago, and studies have found large reductions in subway suicides after installation, especially with full-height doors that physically block access to the track area [16].
In Montréal, the idea has been discussed for years. More than discussed, in fact. In the STM’s 2021–2030 capital program, platform doors for the Orange Line appeared as a project of roughly $568 million. The project description was bluntly practical: reduce service interruptions caused by human factors, improve regularity and reliability, increase customers’ feeling of safety, and help provide optimal frequency on the Orange Line [17].
Then came the next document.
In the STM’s 2022–2031 capital program, the Orange Line platform-door project, still evaluated at $568 million, was cancelled. The same page also notes that planned bus acquisitions for service additions between 2022 and 2024 were removed, and that other power-supply projects were removed until 100% funding could be obtained [18]. In the 2023–2032 capital program, the STM explained that, because of financial difficulties linked notably to the COVID-19 pandemic, it had reduced the scope of the 2022–2031 capital program by $2 billion and reviewed project prioritization; some projects were removed, including platform doors, though the work already done was archived and preserved [19].
Archived and preserved. A beautiful phrase. Almost tender.
It means the idea was not foolish. It was not technologically absurd. It was not unwanted. It was merely placed in that municipal afterlife where reasonable things wait to be affordable again.
Meanwhile, Bellechasse.
Bellechasse rises from the spreadsheet with the solemn dignity of a public-works epic.
The Centre de transport Bellechasse began as a project authorized in planning in March 2019 and in realization in March 2021 [20]. It was initially planned at $370.3 million, with complete commissioning expected in January 2022, then delayed to January 2023 [20]. In February 2024, the cost increased by $214.1 million, from $370.3 million to $584.4 million, and complete commissioning was delayed to September 2024 [20]. In March 2025, the cost became $584.5 million and complete commissioning was delayed again, this time to September 2026 [20]. By March 2026, partial commissioning had been achieved during the 2025–2026 financial year [20].
The garage is not merely a garage. That would be too modest a word for a project with a current approved cost of $584.5 million, including $442.5 million from Québec and $142.0 million from partners [20]. The STM described Bellechasse as eventually able to park and maintain about 250 buses, with progressive commissioning beginning in fall 2025 with employees and hybrid buses [21]. Québec’s own green-bond documentation describes Bellechasse as the STM’s first garage designed to accommodate a 100% electric bus fleet, contributing to the Québec government’s electrification plan [22].
There is more.
In December 2020, the STM announced a $671.4 million loan by-law for Phase 1 of its bus-garage electrification program. Of that amount, $160 million was allocated to Bellechasse so that it could eventually house 200 electric buses [23]. In November 2021, Québec announced at COP26 a $5 billion investment to electrify 55% of urban buses by 2030 and adapt the garages of transportation businesses, among other things [24]. The 2030 Plan for a Green Economy also set the goal that electric buses account for 55% of all city buses in Québec by 2030 [25].
One should say the obvious thing, because otherwise the argument becomes too convenient: bus electrification is good.
Cleaner buses are good. Quieter buses are good. Depots must be adapted. Charging infrastructure does not install itself by civic optimism. A large transit agency cannot electrify a fleet by buying vehicles and hoping the garages will somehow understand.
But public priorities are revealed not only by what they fund. They are revealed by what they can fund grandly, what they can fund reluctantly, and what they can defer with a sad face.
Bellechasse became a climate project, a garage project, an architectural-integration project, a green-bond object, an electrification object, and a half-billion-dollar inevitability. Platform doors, by comparison, remained a safety project, and safety projects have the misfortune of being easiest to defer until after the next report, the next death, the next recommendation, the next expression of institutional regret.
The coroners have been clear enough.
In 2024, after a woman died after accidentally falling in front of a metro at Jean-Talon station, a Quebec coroner recommended that the STM install platform doors, beginning with the busiest stations: 25% of stations before 2027, then another 25% every two years, reaching all stations before 2033 [26]. The coroner also recommended that the transport ministry ensure the STM had the funding required to install platform doors in all stations before 2033 [26]. The response to the STM recommendation was that it could not be applied. The ministry’s response stated that it could not oblige the STM to prioritize [26].
In 2025, after another death in the metro, a coroner recommended that the STM advance the schedule for the study of platform doors, then planned for 2033 [27]. Again, the response was that the recommendation could not be applied. The stated precision was simple: insufficient funding [27]. Other recommendations — more surveillance, more trained employees, more safety ambassadors — were accepted in whole or part, but even the recommendation to place safety ambassadors in all stations during all opening hours was limited by financial constraints [27].
So the public arithmetic becomes difficult to ignore.
A garage may be necessary and still grotesquely expensive. Electrification may be virtuous and still politically convenient. Platform doors may be expensive and still morally obvious. But if hundreds of millions can be organized around storing and charging buses, while a known safety intervention remains archived, postponed, studied, recommended, and then rejected for insufficient funding, then the question is not whether the system has priorities. Of course it has priorities.
The question is what those priorities reveal when the train enters the station.
This is the same city that can charge a passenger extra for crossing a fare-zone seam by one stop, yet cannot quite price the platform edge in a way that makes the door appear. It can distinguish Zone A from Zone B with admirable precision. It can update fare tables. It can pilot Android virtual fares. It can announce a $146-million fare-modernization program. It can model electrification. It can list contributions by partner. It can move a commissioning date from January 2022 to January 2023 to September 2024 to September 2026. It can archive the work already done. It can preserve the file.
But the edge remains.
A fare system tells us how a region understands access. A platform edge tells us how a city understands risk. In both cases, the design is not merely technical. It is ethical, though everyone involved may prefer the comfort of calling it operational.
The one-station tax is annoying because it makes public transit feel less graceful than it should. The missing platform doors are worse because they make a known danger feel permanent.
A city should not need to be perfect to be humane.
It should, at minimum, know where the edge is.