A Company Ranked Public Transit Around The World — And Montreal Got A Sucky Grade

Montreal might have a fantastic public transit system by North American standards, but it falls behind globally, according to the Oliver Wyman Forum's "Urban Mobility Readiness Index." Among the 60 cities on six continents that the forum evaluated, Montreal places 31st for public transit with a score of 53.1%.

Bloomberg was first to publish news about the forum's public transit ranking.

Montreal is in the company of Dubai (29th), Buenos Aires (30th), Shanghai (32nd) and Boston (33rd).

The city did get points for "its dense, affordable bus and metro networks" and plans to electrify its transit. But that wasn't enough to even get top marks in Canada. That honour went to Vancouver, which claimed 22nd place. Toronto trails behind the other two Canadian cities in 34th place.

North America was shut out of the global top 10; in ascending order: Hong Kong, Zurich, Stockholm, Singapore, Helsinki, Oslo, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin and London. New York was the highest-ranking city on the continent in 13th place.

To compile the index, the Oliver Wyman Forum quantified cities' performance in 57 topics across five categories: "infrastructure, social impact, market attractiveness, systems efficiency, and innovation."

For the public transit sub-ranking, specifically, the forum looked at "transit commute speed, public transit affordability, rail network, public transit station density, length of walk to [public transit], strength of multimodal network, diversity of public transit modes, public transit operating hours, transit estimated time of arrival, multimodal app maturity, public transit utilization, share of time in public transit" and "autonomous transit in operation."

In the overall index, Montreal placed 26th with a score of 60.9%.