Construction on major streets is a familiar sight for Montreal drivers trying to navigate the downtown core these days and it just got a lot worse.
Work has already begun on Sherbrooke Street West between Peel and Robert-Bourassa Boulevard and will continue for the next year.
“On this street, the infrastructure is very old in some cases,” project manager Pierre Sainte-Marie said. “Some of the pipes below us are over 100 years old.”
“Fifty-five metres of the collectors will be changed – that’s the sewer pipe lowest in the ground – you also have two secondary sewer pipes. You have a main, a water pipe, you have secondary water pipes.”
The city will also be fixing hydro lines, phone lines, and the gas infrastructure, along with changing sidewalks and planting trees – all of this culminating in a traffic nightmare.
Traffic consultant Rick Leckner thinks the timing is a big problem.
“Five years ago, no one knew that we’d be redoing the Champlain Bridge, the Turcot Interchange and the Bonaventure,” he said. “I’m not convinced everybody takes that into consideration.”
He foresees some big issues, saying this is going to have a major impact on downtown traffic.
Although many drivers are going to be impacted negatively, some seem to be taking it in stride or perhaps Montrealers have just become used to the non-stop construction.
Despite the optimism, Leckner suggested the problems may get worse in the future.
He said things will get squeezed even more when the Ville-Marie expressway is reduced by half of its available lanes as of November 2016.
The city is aware of the impact, but it says the work needs to get done.
“We’ve been very careful to put signs up as to where people can go where there’s the least amount of problems,” Sainte-Marie said.
That’s not all that comforting for everyone, especially Leckner, who said the limited number of available routes is “frightening.”