Digging 150 km of tunnels and building 150 stations. Five scenarios for 2030: from $7.8B to $18.4B depending on the boring rate and the type of stations — that is $52 to $122M per kilometre.
Running the network 24/7, 365 days a year: 602 employees, maintenance, energy, shuttles, immersive décor and leases.
How to read these two numbers
The two do not compare directly. Construction is a one-time expense — the money you have to raise just once to build the network. Operation is a recurring expense — what it costs every year, indefinitely, to keep the network open, clean, monitored and heated. A project can be affordable to build but heavy to run, or the reverse; so you have to look at both.
Each page presents several scenarios in constant 2030 dollars, to show the range rather than a single, falsely precise figure: five scenarios for construction, three for operation. The amounts above are the realistic scenarios.
And compared to the rest? Per kilometre, this network comes in 4 to 16 times cheaper than the region's other transport megaprojects. The Comparison page sets the cost against the third road link and other projects.
A megaproject, at the price of a reasonable one.
≈ $11.2B to build 150 km of all-season network, then ≈ $212M a year to keep it alive. These are big numbers — but spread over 150 km and set against the region's other transport infrastructure, they tell the story of a project whose per-kilometre cost is among the lowest in its class.
All amounts are preliminary orders of magnitude, in constant 2030 dollars. The detail of the assumptions and the scenarios is on the Construction and Operation pages. A formal economic study would set the final values.
Main sources. Québec heavy-transit comparables. REM — $9.4 B for 67 km (cost rose from $7 B in 2018 to $9.4 B in 2024, according to the Auditor General): Le Devoir, La Presse ; $125 M/km according to CDPQ Infra (98,5 Montréal, official CDPQ Infra fact sheet). Québec Tramway — $7.6 B for 19 km, entry into service planned for 2033: La Presse, Le Devoir.