Straphanger
Blog
I had the pleasure of spending three days in Quebec City last month. Years ago, it was one of the places that made me fall in love with the province of Quebec. I was mourning the break-up of a relationship with a woman from France, where I’d spent four years in the 1990s. A couple of sojourns in the « capitale nationale du Québec » (1) made me think I’d discovered a St. Malo-in-the-Snow, a 400-year-old city apparently airlifted—fortifications and cobblestones intact—to the Americas from provincial France. My first couple of times in the city, I stayed at the Maison Demers on Rue Ste-Ursule, a preserved-in-aspic hotel with steep, creaky staircases, a concierge’s room, and a continental breakfast of croissants and drip coffee left for you on shelves in the hall; exactly like the kind of places I’d stayed at in France. (I checked: the Maison Demers is still there.)
The historic centre of Québec is in fact rather small, and the surrounding city is full of standard-issue strip malls and suburban sprawl. But the old city is beautifully preserved, and I always undergo strange moments of dépaysement, disorientation, when I’m there: a sense of being on another continent, even in another time. Until, of course, North America re-enters the frame, in the form of a keening police-car siren, or the appearance of a yellow school bus.
Another way Québec is not like France: its system of public transportation.
There are now over 20 cities in France, from Montpellier to Lille, that have their own light rail systems (or tramways, as they’re known there). Québec’s population has reached 550,000, with a metro population of 840,000, making it the 7th largest metro area in Canada. A lot of this area is dense and compact, especially compared to cities in North America like Calgary, or Phoenix, or Dallas. Yet its transit network depends solely on buses, none of which truly qualify as Bus Rapid Transit.
