Transport committee  With hybrid buses, you have to understand that for them to work, to save fuel, you have to use them wisely. You have to brake a lot, because the hybrid buses use electric braking to recharge the battery. If you go on a highway with a hybrid, it's worthless; and even on the highwa

Transport committee  Perhaps I can add something. STM is a huge bus operator, so we have a responsibility to the smaller ones to test new things. I have many engineers and technicians working for me. If you take the Trois-Rivières society, they have no engineers. So they use AVT, Serge's group, to ge

Transport committee  Yes, in Vancouver they have the same hydroelectricity that we have. They have a lot of it. If you look at the whole picture, if you look at all the pollution you make from well to wheel, throughout the cycle, it changes if you're in Montreal or in Calgary. I can understand that C

Transport committee  You're right that our ridership has been rising, with record figures over the last years. Unfortunately, it's not because of technology. STM has been very aggressive with publicity, in a big public campaign saying that it's very intelligent for someone to take the bus or take the

Transport committee  There are two sides to your question. The first side is about best practices. For the last 15 years I have been a member of many international committees. The UITP, which is the international union of transporters, makes exchanges with all the major metros of the world and all th

Transport committee  Yes, through CUTA we do that. But you have to understand that natural gas buses have been around for more than 20 years. I don't see the point of having a demonstration of natural gas buses. You can buy them off the shelf today. Even New Flyer offered them. So it's not new techno

Transport committee  You have to understand that the transit bus market in Canada is not very big. Even if we have thousands of buses to buy in the next four years, those thousands of buses are for a big European company that builds every year....what?

Transport committee  You have one company that builds 8,000 a year, and you have many companies like that. They would be interested in coming to us and selling the buses and putting them in conformity with our rules and regulations if they could sell those buses to the United States, but they will

Transport committee  Yes. You have to understand that North American buses are built to the Americans' liking. They're very huge buses. They're very tough, they're like tanks, and they're very heavy. We have them in service for 16 years in Montreal. They're very tough. European buses are lighter, s

Transport committee  In an airport, you—

Transport committee  Airport buses are special buses. They're much bigger, and since they don't go into the streets, the rule doesn't apply. You can buy whatever you want to ride on your private property. It's not a street, so they can use anything.

Transport committee  As I explained a little earlier, fuel cell buses are electric buses: you merely replace the batteries with fuel cells. All the traction system in the bus is the same. The problem with fuel cells is with the hydrogen in them. Once you put hydrogen in a bus, you cannot put the bus

Transport committee  That's a tough one. We don't look at it this way. STM bus service is built around 12-metre buses that can accommodate 60 people. The service is built with buses of this capacity that can be left outside for more than 24 hours without refuelling. I think the range is 500 kilomet

Transport committee  Yes, before selecting electrification and even before the provincial government announced its objective of electrifying public transit, we did our homework. So we studied buses with hydrogen fuel batteries, buses powered by natural gas and all kinds of other buses. I will spare y

Transport committee  With trolleybuses, the wires are a very serious issue. Unfortunately, induction, magnetic and other technologies are mainly applied to tramways, and that is very recent even in that case. We are still talking about demonstration projects; this is not really in service. For trolle