WATCH ABOVE: The STM is having issues getting all of its buses out on the road on time. As Global’s Gloria Henriquez reports, it’s not one, but a series of problems that are to blame.
MONTREAL — The STM admits it is having issues getting all its buses out on the city’s roads.
“Each year we deliver about 95 million kilometres and as of July 31, we’re short about 800 thousand kilometres,” said Luc Tremblay, general director of STM.
Those 800,000 kilometres that are not being covered roughly represent a trip from Montreal to the moon and back and customers are noticing it.
“There’s much less buses, a lot of construction,” said Thomas Arditi, who was lining up to take one of the buses out of Vendôme metro station.
“I’m going to school and I’m late because two buses just didn’t show up,” said another user.
The transit commission insists a number of factors are adding to the problem.
First, they need to reconstruct their maintenance facilities.
“We need to do the maintenance and reconstruct the facilities at the same time, it’s not easy,” admitted Tremblay.
Their aging fleet of buses is also less and less reliable and they don’t have enough staff to operate them.
“We have almost 400 construction sites on the Montreal territory so we need to cope with that every morning,” he added.
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NDG City Councillor Peter McQueen said the real problem is that Québec’s Transport Minister, Robert Poeti is not focusing on the city enough.
“He’s gonna give you free parking and a train that operates on the exact schedule with a seat for you, while on the city here in Montreal we’re on jammed packed buses that might not show up, standing room to the gills, squeezed like sardines only,” he said.
“We don’t think that’s fair. More money for STM transit.”
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For now, the STM said it has a game plan to improve service.<
"We hired more than 100 people who managed to cope with the problem," said Tremblay.
"We did an overtime blitz during the summer and we put some mobile maintenance units to repair buses."
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