Wheelchair access to Vendôme should be a priority

The new MUHC superhospital is touted to be a state-of-the-art facility. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the métro station that is supposed to serve it.

The Vendôme station, located adjacent to the hospital site, is already heavily crowded. In addition to the local traffic it handles, it also serves as a transfer point for commuter rail passengers coming from the West Island and beyond whose numbers have increased steadily in recent years.

By Société de transport de Montréal estimate, that crowding will increase considerably once the new hospital comes into operation in 2015. About 12,000 people are expected to converge on the hospital daily, with half of them arriving by public transit. We are assured that improvements are in the works. The STM announced this week that “transitional measures” will be undertaken in short order to facilitate access to the hospital.

Under the plan, two of the station’s staircases will be doubled in width, one for passengers heading to the exit on de Maisonneuve Blvd., the other to serve a tunnel that now takes passengers to commuter trains. This tunnel will be extended to reach the hospital.

To help reduce crowding in the station, a new staircase is to be built inside to let passengers access bus stops on Vendôme’s east side without having to cross the central part of the station, as is now the case. The configuration of turnstiles is to be changed to reduce conflicts between inbound and outbound passen- gers. Another planned improvement is a new walkway to be built on the station’s western side. People on foot not using the métro will be able to access the tunnel to the hospital without entering the station. It will also serve as an emergency exit for the tunnel. It might be covered.

But while these improvements are all well and good, even if they are completed in time for the hospital opening, the station will still have a major failing in that, astoundingly, there are no plans to install an elevator to allow wheelchair access to and from the station, or even an escalator, something with which most stations are equipped.

STM officials say that providing universal accessibility by way of an elevator would require a second entrance to the station along with a direct tunnel to the hospital. Feasibil- ity studies to this effect are underway, but the provincial government is waffling over whether it will commit to the estimated $75 million cost of the installations.

Even if the project gets the go-ahead in short order, the estimated three years it will take to complete will leave the station without wheelchair access by the time the hospital opens. The STM has so far managed to equip seven métro stations with elevators for wheelchair access since it began a program in 2008 to equip all its stations within 25 years. That Vendôme was not among those given priority, when the hospital site was chosen two years before then, is an unpardonable oversight.

The provincial government should move smartly to correct this by approving the necessary funding now — not maybe at some later date.