"A young mother boards the tram with her three children. The stroller, where the youngest is sleeping, is accompanied by the two older ones, aged three and four. The eldest validates the ticket. Two stops later, the mother gets off, pushing the stroller, closely followed by her two toddlers."

This brief slice of everyday life clearly illustrates the fluidity and user-friendly nature of a tramway system. While such systems can operate underground, tramways allow level boarding through multiple doors simultaneously, making boarding and exiting easier. In addition, the short distance between stations (approximately 400 m) increases the density of the served area, enabling efficient, simple, and seamless travel.

Public transit is often perceived as a means of getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible. However, integrating a tramway into a neighborhood or city street is akin to installing a “moving sidewalk” that reduces distances and brings services and shops closer together. The system’s fluidity and regularity make it a strong connector, also helping draw peri-urban populations into the city, fostering density and development.   

A bit of history… 

In Québec, as elsewhere, tramways experienced a period of prosperity until the widespread adoption of the automobile. To make room for this new mode of transportation, tramway networks, seen as cumbersome, were gradually dismantled to allow cars to dominate.

In France, nearly 98 networks and 3,700 km of tramway lines were removed. Faced with the rapid growth of automobile use, mobility policies began promoting the return of public transit systems in the late 1970s. The first modern network opened in Nantes in 1985, marking the beginning of a strong resurgence. Today, tramways have become a symbol of prestige for cities, reflecting their dynamism and commitment to citizen mobility.

The disappearance of tramway networks was not unique to France. In Montreal, in the early 1920s, the tramway system included more than 500 km of tracks and 900 vehicles, carrying nearly 230 million passengers annually. As in France, the growing popularity of automobiles led to the gradual dismantling of these networks.

Today, Nice, a city comparable to Québec City in population size, has 27.5 km of tram lines and 46 stations. Caen, comparable to Sherbrooke, has 22.6 km and 37 stations. In Québec City, the tramway line scheduled to open in 2028 will span 19.3 km and include 29 stations. It may well represent the first milestone in a broader return of tramways in Québec, allowing this ecological, reliable, fluid, comfortable, and development-driven mode of transportation to reclaim its place at the heart of major cities.

While these cities do not face the same climatic constraints as Québec, human ingenuity has, as with automobiles, developed solutions adapted to conditions that can easily be described as extreme.

Photo credit: STGM Architecture / Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker