Rotrand, who is organizing a public meeting on May 14 at 7 p.m. at 6767 Côte des Neiges Road for West End transit users to express their views on bus service, said the MTC is getting additional funding from Quebec and the City of Montreal to improve bus and Metro service.

"The board just agreed to a $234 million deal with the province and the city over the next five years aimed at increasing ridership by eight per cent over the five-year period," he told the Chronicle.

"By improving our services by 16 per cent — increasing the hours of services and the number of kilometres by 16 per cent — that's a massive boost in services."

The first 56 of a fleet of 202 sixty-foot articulated buses that the MTC plans on buying will be going into service in late 2009. "We are looking at Côte des Neiges-NDG as an area to deploy these buses," he said

According to Rotrand, the MTC is seriously looking at the 51 Edouard-Montpetit and 105 Sherbrooke as bus routes on which to have the articulated vehicles.

"We think that would provide better service and would address the issue of crowding that we hear from riders," he said. "Both those routes are heavily utilized. The 105 is really the backbone of the transit system in NDG. The 51 is a convenient link from the centre of the island into Côte des Neiges-NDG.

"It serves the University of Montreal, it serves Snowdown and comes into NDG and there are a lot of people who use that bus as a shuttle to the Snowdon Metro and people the 105 to get to the Vendôme Metro. So these routes are being seriously considered for the new type of vehicle for October 2009."

Rotrand said the MTC was unable to initiate the improvement program until now. "Since 1992, transit has been the whipping boy of successive provincial governments who cut their subsidies. We used to get a lot of money directly from Quebec as part of an operational subsidy.

"That disappeared. We had to become more efficient and we provided generally good services and were recognized internationally as one of the better operators worldwide. But even so, we've always felt we could do much more. Now we are finally getting some of the funds."

Since early January, in response to complaints that Metro train service was too infrequent, it has been increased by 17 per cent, much of it in off-peak hours, Rotrand added. As a result, there has been a 3.5 per cent increase in ridership.

However, bus lines feeding to Metro stations have become more crowded as a result. "We're going to have to work on improving bus services," he said.