2005 Proposed Projection of the Metro of the Future

By Aaron Gordon

Like the 1967 map, the Montreal by Metro/Metro de Montreal web site, the fan site for the Montreal Metro, has designed a Metro for 2100. This dream future Metro is not unlike the dream of 1967: more and longer routes, more transfer stations. This wish map, like its predecessor, seems to have broken the stranglehold of the downtown over the Metro. Going as far as Point-aux-Trembles and West past the Airport, the Metro decentres the Island, making connections between parts of the city unmediated by the downtown core.

But this is the weird thing about plans built on the future: they are only ever corrections for today’s problems and rarely imagine a future much different from the present. The future of the present is imagined only as the present--but bigger. Building a Metro inspired by the future usually has the effect of determining what that future will look like. Determining the points of access to a mass transport system goes a long was of plotting out future development, the spread of gentrification, and the foci of city. As the city administration of the present puts more resources into potholes and cuts funding to public transit, who will the Metro of the future service? What will the “One Island, One city” of Montreal look like?

Recently the mayor of Montreal seems to be contemplating the return of the streetcar. The little bits of street car track that poke up from history at intersections like Atwater and Sherbrooke could once again become a reality. The city of the future could be criss-crossed with steel rails and low hanging wires. One can ask what a city with street cars will look like. I would ask what will happen to Montreal, a modern city that has been built on the desire for the future, look like when it turns away from the Metro as an ideal of the future?