On a sunny morning this November, I boarded the Réseau Express Métropolitain, Montreal’s brand-new light metro line, for its first voyage. From the front of the driverless train, the crowd got a privileged view of the rough rock walls of the century-old tunnel under Mont-Royal and the ice-rimed shores of the Rivière-des-Prairies. The journey was not just a tour of the REM’s 14 new stations, however—it was a preview of the most ambitious transit expansion in North America.

The last time Montreal celebrated the opening of a new rapid transit line, the Expos were still running the bases at Olympic Stadium, and Mitsou was tearing up the pop charts with “Bye bye mon cowboy.” Since the inauguration of the Montreal Metro’s Blue Line in 1988, the city’s network has added just three stations. Now, the opening of the REM has vaulted Canada’s second largest city from a transportation laggard to a frontrunner. It’s also provided a low-cost template of quick-to-build rapid transit that every Canadian city struggling with gridlock, long commutes and inflated transit costs can, and should, emulate. Next spring, a new branch will open to the island’s western suburbs, and another is slated to reach Trudeau airport in 2027. By that point the REM will span 26 stations and 67 kilometres—it’s an expansion that invites comparison to the long-awaited Grand Paris Express, four new lines of automated trains that will serve Paris’s outer suburbs by 2030.

Riding that train made me feel like Canada was finally building transit fit for the 21st century, a worthy counterpart to the systems that are now common in Asian and European cities. This is a sharp contrast to the rest of the country. For the most part, Canada’s cities are lacking the kind of transit networks people now take for granted in much of the world. Toronto has struggled for years to finish the Eglinton Crosstown, a light-rail project that is now going into its 15th year of construction. The Ontario Line, the successor to the Downtown Relief Line—a project first proposed in the 1980s—won’t be completed........

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