Frequent REM outages: CDPQ Infra apologizes and promises improvement

The subsidiary of Quebec deposit and deposit fund CDPQ Infra apologized Thursday for the repeated service interruptions that occurred in recent days at the Réseau Express Métropolitain (REM) and confirmed that it is taking measures to improve.

“CDPQ Infra would like to apologize to the users affected by the situation, and reiterates its commitment to providing them with a reliable and high-quality public transport service,” the organization announced in a press release.

Since the beginning of the week, three major breakdowns have paralyzed high-speed trains for hours on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, leading to the evacuation of trains in some cases. Many users subsequently complained of being left in the dark, with no information about what was happening.

Promising improvement, the REM Director announced a series of measures to strengthen incident management by the Group of Metropolitan Mobility Consortium Partners (GPMM), made up of Alstom and AtkinsRéalis (formerly SNC-Lavalin).

Thus, CDPQ Infra wants to have a plan to “significantly improve incident management”, respect the planned evacuation time in the event of a problem and improve its communications with users.

“CDPQ Infra will carefully supervise the rollout of this plan which will start immediately and which will continue over the coming weeks to meet high-quality user service requirements,” the group added.

The organization realized that although accidents on public transportation are common, the standards imposed on managing these accidents must be high.