In 2017 Valérie Plante ran for mayor of Montreal on a platform centered on one flagship promise. A new pink metro line. 21 kilometers of new subway infrastructure connecting the northeast of the city to downtown. The ligne rose. The project that would transform mobility in Montreal’s underserved neighborhoods. The promise that won her the election. She served two mandates as mayor. She announced she would not seek a third. She left office in November 2025. The ligne rose never happened. What She Promised and What She Delivered In October 2021, one month before the municipal election, Valérie Plante announced that the ligne rose project was being replaced by the REM de l’Est. A different transit project, developed by a different authority, on a different timeline. The project that was supposed to be the centerpiece of her vision for Montreal’s transit future was quietly replaced with something she did not build and did not control. The REM de l’Est eventually opened five stations on July 31, 2023. The rest of the network will be implemented progressively until 2027. Which means the transit transformation promised in 2017 is a partial delivery on a different project a decade after the original promise. What Plante did deliver was the Réseau express vélo. The REV. A network of protected cycling lanes including the flagship Saint-Denis axis opened in 2020. A Vision vélo 2023-2027 promising 200 kilometers of new cycling infrastructure. Cycling trips in Montreal increased by 20 percent to 12 million in 2022. The bike network is real. The pink metro line is not. The Cycling Debate Montreal Never Resolved Plante’s cycling infrastructure produced genuine results for the people who use it. The REV Saint-Denis has 1.5 million annual passages. In some central neighborhoods up to 24 percent of morning commuters travel by bicycle. These are real numbers. They are also numbers that mean very little to the resident of Montreal’s northeast who needed the pink line to reach downtown without a car and never got it. Or the bus rider whose route was slowed by cycling infrastructure changes. Or the small business owner on a street that lost vehicle lanes and parking to a bike path they did not want. Plante defended her record vigorously. She argued that safety for vulnerable road users outweighs traffic flow for vehicles. She pointed to the 398 collisions on a single segment of Hochelaga in six years as justification for removing vehicle lanes. The new mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada has already announced evaluations of four cycling lanes that she identified as particularly problematic. Including Rachel, Côte-Sainte-Catherine, Meilleur and de la Commune. The current administration is explicitly reviewing what Plante built. The Tramways That Were Also Promised Beyond the pink line Plante spoke of tramways. She said she did not dream in color when imagining a network of trams across the city. Under her administration no tram line was built. Not the shadow of one wagon was seen according to Radio-Canada’s assessment of her legacy. Two mandates. No pink line. No tramways. A cycling network. A replaced flagship project. Whether that constitutes a successful transit legacy depends on which Montrealer you ask. For the cyclist on Saint-Denis it is transformative. For the resident of Pointe-aux-Trembles who needed rapid transit to downtown it is eight years of waiting for something that was promised and not delivered. What Montreal Still Does Not Have Montreal was among the 30 most congested cities in the world according to the Inrix Global Traffic Scorecard during Plante’s tenure. The A-25 approach ranked among the worst congestion points in Canada with 250,000 hours of annual delay. The Lafontaine tunnel operates at reduced capacity until 2027. The city has no ring road and no complete bypass. These are the conditions Plante inherited and the conditions she left. The cycling network expanded significantly. The fundamental infrastructure problems that make Montreal one of the most operationally difficult cities in North America for both drivers and transit users were not solved. Pierre Barrieau, a transport planning lecturer at UQAM, noted that Plante inherited more than 40 years of infrastructure deferred maintenance. Not just roads. Sewers. Aqueducts. The network has serious problems. Which is accurate. Which also means the cycling network that Plante built was added to a city that cannot manage the road and transit infrastructure it already has. The Pink Line Lives On Twitter The ligne rose was announced. It became the centerpiece of a successful mayoral campaign. It generated political energy and public investment in the idea of what Montreal could become. It was then replaced with a different project on a different timeline that Plante did not build. The pink line as an actual infrastructure project was quietly retired in October 2021 and replaced with a political statement about why a different project was better. The residents of the neighborhoods who voted for a pink metro line in 2017 got a cycling network, a partial REM, and an evaluation of problematic bike lanes by the next administration. The pink line exists in political history. It does not exist on the ground. Which is the specific gap between Montreal’s announced urban vision and its delivered infrastructure that this platform has been documenting across multiple sectors. The announcement is always ambitious. The delivery is always somewhere between partial and deferred. The ligne rose is just the most visible example. SIIIOCULI — Intelligence. Sovereignty. Awareness. siiioculi.lilxbrxaker.com