A guide to Montreal public transport

By Katharine O’Hearn, Concordia University, Canada

On arrival to Montreal I found that there is a lot about the public transport here which is not talked about very much online – this will be a quick guide to everything you need to know about Montreal public transport/a review of Montreal public transport.

1. Opus cards. You can get a student Opus card once you have your student ID card and Quebec address- this gives you discounts on monthly and four-month passes. One thing to note about this is that these work from the first of the month, not from when you buy the pass, so you will need to load your card with trips until then if you get to Montreal towards the middle of the month- I’m not sure how many days of flexibility there are after the beginning of the month to get the pass for that month though.
2. Reloading Opus cards. Online most information I saw says that Opus cards can only be reloaded at metro stations or at other physical locations, but they can be reloaded through an app called Chrono too, which is much more convenient. The app should look like this:

3. The metro runs from about 5:30am to 1am each day, and there are buses 24 hours a day.

4. A general review of Montreal public transport: Montreal has generally good transport- the metro stations I’ve been to are all fairly clean and well lit, and the buses are reliable (with only the past week being an exception to this in my experience so far, and that unreliability being because of the fact that there was 74 centimetres of snow after two snowstorms in a few days last week, which is the most snowfall there has been in that short a time in Montreal since 1941)

5. Concordia specific information: there is a shuttle bus between the Loyola and Downtown campuses, which is helpful if you have classes on both or live on one and have classes on the other. However, it only runs from 9:15-6:30 Mondays-Fridays (6:15 on Friday), which is not very convenient given the fact that there are classes which start earlier and end later than these times. Additionally, the shuttle bus often does not run on time, and may miss certain times it is set to leave one campus or the other. But when it is on time, it can be by far the quickest way to get from one campus to another (17 minutes as opposed to the bus and metro combination of usually 40+ minutes).