The Quebec City Tram is very exciting.
Canada will soon have 8 urban areas with electric rail service, and its latest will be something special!
If you like to follow me on a more regular basis, I am mostly moving over to Mastodon from Twitter. I know Mastodon is not as straightforward as it should be but, they’ve fixed a lot of stuff and if you join via the iOS app it’s surprisingly easy! It also means not putting another billionaire in charge of an important public social platform, and unlike Bluesky it feels fresh! I don’t really want a Twitter replacement, I want something that can be better!
The 10 years from 2015 to 2025 have been quite the wild ride for transit in Canada. We’ve got the Evergreen SkyTrain extension, the York Spadina Subway extension, Waterloo ION, O-Train Line 1 (hopefully we can get that one sorted out), and the REM! And we will likely see a few more major projects like the Edmonton Valley line, the Eglinton, Finch, and Hurontario lines in the GTHA, and more REM open before 2025.
That’s a ton of new transit, and yet the next 10 years are set to be even more exciting. Montreal and Toronto will see new subway extensions and lines, Vancouver will finally have it’s Broadway subway and the Surrey SkyTrain extension, both Calgary and Edmonton will see significant light rail expansion, and Hamilton will get a tram route - we might even see the beginnings of high speed rail!
But, there’s one project that has been on my mind a lot lately, and that’s the Quebec City tram.
If you aren’t familiar, French cities and French rail manufacturer Alstom are really leading the renaissance of trams in Europe, with many newly built lines in Paris and also in tons of small provincial French cities (including a bunch smaller than Quebec City). I’ve been quietly hoping some of that French tramway building expertise would cross the Atlantic for a long time, because while Ontario will soon have tram routes in more than 5 cities, Quebec still has a single electric rail system — Montreal’s Metro and now REM!
So what makes the modern French tramways worth emulating? Well, for one, the systems are everywhere… Marseille, Lyon, Paris, Bordeaux, Le Mans, Nice, and on and on — More than 15 modern tram systems have been built in France in the last 30 years. If Canada was building trams in cities of the same size as France, Halifax, Winnipeg, London, Saskatoon, and many more cities would have electric rail routes.
As I mentioned, Ontario is kind of going wild building “LRT” routes all over the place (not always in the most appropriate contexts), but the projects in that province lack some of the thoughtful touches of the modern French tramways — which basically all use Alstom vehicles and good looking ones at that:
By comparison, the vehicles used in Ontario projects (and those in the rest of the country) are just… meh. They’re okay and they do the job, but they aren’t going to turn heads. Of course, turning heads is not a primary objective of public transport, but a system that instills civic pride and looks good is a real asset to a city.
The French tramways also tend to have superb urban design (remade streets and public spaces near the line), lightweight overhead wires (or sometimes Alstom’s APS third rail system), as well as really well thought out stops with all the amenities you would expect and finishings that looks good even with wear.
Best of all, the new routes tend to have really good wayfinding and “digital enablement”, so you have good on-tram wayfinding with full LCDs and lots of information in lots of cases, and also really good “next-tram” screens at stops. My point here is just that the execution of these projects is really excellent, and just a cut above the basic and often industrial feeling design of projects in Canada.
What excites me about the Quebec City Tram is that it seems like it might change this, and as frustrating as it is, being able to point to a city within the same country that does something better seems to almost always be better for motivating change. If Quebec City does things right today, it can be used as a lever to move other cities in the right direction tomorrow.
But, before we talk about the nitty gritty, what are the essentials of the project?
The Quebec City tram will be a 29-stop, 19.3-kilometre tram route running east-west across a large part of Quebec City, which feels quite substantial for a first project. Interestingly, there will be a short tunnel with two underground stations on it (not unheard of on French tramways) that will let the route climb off the high plateau from Quebec’s National Assembly, past old Quebec City (which the route just deflects off of), and surface in the Saint Roch area. There are also 5 stops that are treated as major transit exchanges and will offer more substantial bus facilities for connections. Interestingly, the maintenance facility located near the western terminus will be fully enclosed like Montreal Metro garages — allowing for heated storage of trams in the winter.
What’s nice about this route is that it connects a lot of major destinations and deals with big challenges like getting down from the Plateau. This will drive ridership and also make incremental expansion down the road a much less expensive proposition. This ties in with another element of modern French tramways, which is that they are often extended with small incremental projects, and many cities have a number of lines; the way Quebec City has planned its first line makes this quite feasible here as well. Better yet, the urban design appears to be heavily influenced by France, and the stop design in particular has apparently taken a lot from the Lyon Tramway.
The trams are also something special, at least for North America. For whatever reason, cities from Dubai to Sydney to Rio have managed to import trams from Europe that look sleek, but North American cities just tend to get designs which look less sophisticated and expensive, especially if the paint scheme is bad.
In Toronto, this looks like designs that feel... basic, and which incorporate no colour, only shades of flat grey. Perhaps this would fit well in a city that was not itself grey for much of the year. To be clear, these are nitpicks — but they are the type of thing Canada needs to improve at if we want to be great at public transit, in the way that France or Japan is.
Fortunately, this is another place where the Quebec City Tram hits it out of the park, the outside of the vehicles is still grey, but the design is bold — and like the trams on the new Paris T9 route, they have bold LED lighting along their length that will look amazing at night. Better yet, the inside of the trams also have LCD wayfinding and more attractive colourful designs. As with the REM in Montreal, it seems like Alstom is offering three potential designs which could be chosen from (I quite fancy the leftmost option).
What’s interesting is that the platform for these vehicles is the exact same as for the vehicles being used on the “LRT” projects in Toronto, the Citadis Spirit — Alstom has just really made the ones for Quebec City into something special. This should really be the benchmark the next time another North American city orders new low floor trams — most cities around the world do not have trams this nice!
Now, all of this is really exciting: Quebec City is basically locked in to building a substantial tram project and it will be the most attractive one in North America with its heavy European influence. But, unfortunately the project is not all positive.
As you might imagine, the plague of high transit project costs has hit the Quebec City tram, and its total price looks to be north of $4 billion CAD, that’s ~$200 million CAD per kilometre. By comparison, the very nice T9 tram in Paris I mentioned above? That’s costing just around ~$60 million CAD per kilometre, roughly a quarter as much. Now, to be fair, the Quebec City project has two underground stations and a tunnel, and also needs to deal with a much harsher climate, but it’s costing more per kilometre than subways in some cities.
The good news is the high price doesn’t seem to have put the brakes on the project, but if you were hoping for France style tramways in towns across Canada, that’s… unlikely, unless we address our cost problem. Despite this, I think there are two interesting extensions that could quite naturally be added to the initial Quebec City Tram route — there are absolutely others but I wanted to mention these in particular.
A simple 5-kilometre extension to the recently expanded Jean Lesage airport could have 5 stops, expand coverage to the airport, drive redevelopment near Autoroute 40, and provide a seamless journey to the centre of Quebec City for tourists as well as serving airport workers.
Another useful extension would create a branch (perhaps called T2?) that would run east through central Quebec City, connecting the VIA rail station and various destinations on the waterfront, such as a cruise ship terminal, the funicular to Old Quebec City, and the ferry across to Levis. This extension would be 2.5 kilometres and would also have 5 stops.
With these two extensions, Quebec City would have quite an impressive tram service — with 39 stops, two service patterns, and connection to most of the intermodal transport hubs in the city.
All in all, Quebec City’s Tram, although a very much imperfect project ,still excites me a lot because it meaningfully improves on a lot of projects that came before it. It’s also the foundation of a larger, denser, and more interesting Quebec City — which will give Quebec a sorely needed second metropolis.
Surprised why the Jean Lesage Airport and Gare de Palais isn’t in the first phase of the plan, would be great to have a good connection for both. Canada seems to be good at them now with UP Express, Canada Line, and soon REM YUL branch and Airport Line 4
Some of the routing of the tramsway will have right-of-ways along with a SINGLE traffic lane. Will have to see if they will have the single-occupant automobile priority that Toronto has or will the trams have real priority over the automobile.