The 80 North, a Bitter Cold and Clichés

C’est mon premier hiver. Si j’y survis, je fêterai ma première année passée à Montréal.

22h30. Bus 80, direction Nord. Il est là, je l’attend. Place des Arts. Froid intense : trente-cinq degrés sous zéro, avec un vent qui fouette à faire tomber les larmes.

L’engin reste sur place, adossé à cette promenade des festivals dont je ne comprends ni le sens, ni la dimension. Ses lampadaires galactiques imposent leurs courbatures lourdes sur la ville, éclairant railleusement un tas de neige géant. Un no man’s land. C’est bien. Et puis le MACM, chapeauté par un cube imposant et sombre, qui tiraille les lumières rouges dans un mouvement apaisant.

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Montreal by Bus: Is Your Route Legible?

Photo by Kurt Raschke

To refresh you: in my last article, I talked about the names of bus lines, and how they can be used to help transit users navigate the city. I mentioned, among other things, that buses might be named for the paths that they follow or their end points, and that the strategy varied between different cities. I finished by raising the case of the 104 “Cavendish” bus, which I described as having four segments, only one of which actually is Cavendish Street. The point was that it is hard for users who aren’t in the know to predict the path that this bus is going to take.

Now, it may be that the only people who ride the Cavendish bus are in the know. Although this bus starts at the Atwater Metro station, it quickly peels off of downtown, running more or less along the western extremity of the prewar West End. The people who take the 104 most likely do so frequently, and probably don’t need to be reminded every day of where it goes. And we all know about Côte-St-Luc’s burgeoning tourism scene – you know, alcohol flowing in the water and all that . . .

So for the sake of this article, I’ll need to ask your indulgence. If the STM were to implement my suggestions on real bus lines, they would probably do well to start with busier routes, routes which carry more tourists, and routes which run between key points in the city but aren’t marked as such. In other words, the routes where more navigational help could do more good. The only reason that I’ve chosen the 104 is that it exemplifies many of the problems I’ve observed. I’ll enumerate these problems here, and then I’ll try to solve them to the best of my ability.

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Montreal by Bus: The Names of Bus Routes

You could conceivably have a bus network where bus lines were identified only by their number. We don’t technically need bus routes to have names for them to be usable, as long as each bus has a key: something, probably a number, that makes each route individually identifiable to riders.

Still, it would be pretty silly not to assign bus routes to names. Firstly, and most superficially, we have the capability to show some clarifying text next to the route number on our buses and bus schedules, and it would be silly not to use it. But more importantly, giving riders a name to go with the randomly decided bus route number can pay dividends in usability. Almost all bus systems that I can think of have bus route names displayed prominently right next to bus route numbers, not only on the buses themselves but also on bus signage and schedules.

The way we choose the names we give to buses, however, is open to some debate. Should we name it after the bus’s end point? Points along its path? The areas through which it passes? Different cities come to different conclusions.

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Montreal by Bus: What Is a Bus Line?

This is part of an ongoing series about how Montreal’s bus system could be made easier to navigate.

Photo by Christopher Dewolf

In many Montreal neighbourhoods–especially those that are underserved by the Metro–the bus is absolutely central to life. The 139 whisks Montreal-Nord and Rosemont residents southward along Pie-IX, and the 51 carries passengers from Hampstead and Montreal-Ouest all the way to Laurier station, hugging the mountain more tightly than the Blue Line does. I even suspect that there might be some emotional attachment to some lines: some friends of mine who live off the 80 “Parc Bus” are thinking about having tee shirts printed.

I am convinced, however, that buses are often popular largely in spite of themselves. Across the network, bus lines are often poorly marked and incoherently planned; unlike the iconic Metro map, the bus route map of Montreal is basically a birds’ nest of criscrossing paths. Where other cities have bent over backwards to make their systems comprehensible – colour codes, bright signs, terrific signage – it’s as if our system just became so complicated that everyone stopped trying to make it easy to ride.

My interest in this series of articles is to speak a bit about how we could help people navigate our city’s buses. As you’ve probably gathered by now, this will be mostly a critique! I’d like to explore some the changes that we could make to render our bus lines more “readable” by newcomers: not only newcomers to the STM buses, but also newcomers to individual lines or neighbourhoods. In this article, I’ll begin by setting out just what a bus line is and how it works.

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