Short answer, the line is a class 1 railway owned by Canadian National where freight is usually prioritized. Then, you have Mount Royal and the tunnel between Canora and Central Station. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deux-Montagnes_Line_%28AMT%29

That’d reduce the need for the A10 LRT, and would provide greater networking between the existing lines, especially if an interchange with the blue line could be retrofitted.

Though the Deux-Montagnes line (via Bois Franc) has the highest ridership of the commuter lines, it might make more sense to have it go via Sauvé instead to alleviate the Laval crush on the orange line.

Recently, 30 years or more after the money was pissed away on unneeded airports and the other projects, that debt has at last been paid off.

So I’m hoping that the city’s ability to borrow and invest has returned to normal after the 30-year hangover, and now it can build again. Let’s hope it’s at a more sustainable pace, and not such BOOM! and BUST! again.

Anyway, living in NYC I won’t make fun of cities that are better at announcing projects than literally constructing them. I myself voted for a huge bond issue to finance the Second Avenue Subway, among several other ghostly projects, back in 1969 or so

They announced the tramways a couple years ago and I’m not really aware of any actual progress being made for their construction. A10 LRT i’m even more skeptical of.

And in fact, with this latest sour observation, which added nothing and advanced the discussion not one bit, you may be factually wrong as well. After all, the Traffic Commish of NYC went to Toronto and came back talking about streetcars. She didn’t go to Washington to look at their little streetcar project.

It’s good for Montreal, of course. And it’s good for other Canadian cities, and ultimately for US cities too.

Cities get competitive, you know. One city builds a copy of a Roman arch, its rival builds a marble one, soon matched across the Pond by an arch to honor the father of his country. One city gets a big stadium, the others want big new stadiums. One builds the biggest convention center this side of Mars and the others start planning to expand their own convention centers. One puts up the highest skyscraper between Here and There, and other cities start talking about new skyscrapers. A lot of that is waste and foolishness.

Now Montreal is moving ahead with more subways and streetcar lines. Toronto will not want to backtrack on its own plans now, or be overtaken by its francophone rival. The pressure is now on Ottawa to tunnel under downtown or do whatever it takes to get its transit plan moving. The odds that Edmonton will further expand its light rail system just got better.

They’ll hear about this in Boston and New York, and in Atlanta and L.A., Olympic cities like Montreal. How do you say in French, “Monkey see, monkey do?” This could be a very healthy civic competition all around.

Toronto: 864,000 average daily riders subway + 44,500 Scarborough RT = 908,500
Montréal: 987,000 average daily riders Métro
D.C.: 1,036,000 average daily riders Metro

On the other hand, according to the agencies (paying passengers):
Toronto: 793,000 total average daily riders subway and RT
Montréal: 700,000 average daily riders Métro
D.C.: ~ 715,000 average daily riders Metro

Suffice it to say that heavy rail ridership in Montréal, D.C., and Toronto is relatively similar, but that Montréal and D.C. have a higher number of transfers in their systems than Toronto does (which makes sense if you look at Toronto’s system map). All have good-performing systems that demonstrate that if you invest in a well-designed heavy rail network with excellent connections in the dense core neighborhoods, you’ll get high ridership.

The claim that Montréal has the second-highest heavy rail ridership per capita (in the metro area) remains true, no matter which of the figures above you cite, simply because Montréal’s metropolitan area is smaller in population than Toronto or D.C. but has roughly the same number of heavy rail riders.

Is there a list of the busiest overall transit systems in North America or a list of the transit ridership per N.A. metropolitan area? The closest I’ve seen to this are lists broken down by transit mode, i.e. busiest metro system, busiest LRT system etc. I am wondering how Montreal figures into this, as I understand it places about 4th in NA (after NYC, Mexico City and Toronto), but is this true?