‘Subways are Not Outdated’: Debating the Montreal Metro,1940–60

This article discusses how a subway was represented in debates on its merits as public transit for Montreal, Canada, during the 1940s and 1950s. Opponents argued that subways were obsolete in the automobile age, but supporters saw subway construction as a key tool for stimulating urban development and maintaining the city's prestige in the context of rising competition from Canada's second city, Toronto. Subway supporters regarded the project as being complementary to expressway construction, not as an alternative. A new technology developed in France provided the symbolic power that brought the project to fruition, beginning in 1960.