Guy Arbour isn’t happy with the air quality around his house and he wants the expressway to be covered.
He’s an engineer with expertise in air quality matters and lives close to the Decarie Expressway, and the amount of pollution coming from the highway concerns him so much that he has an air filter at his house.
“The windows are never opened,” he says shaking his head. “This highway was conceived for traffic like 30,000 cars a day. Today it’s over 160,000.”
Others in the area are also fearful. Nicoleta Radu, who lives a stone’s throw from the highway in Cote-des-Neiges, said her neighbours are all concerned and that the air quality is particularly bad in summer.
“You have to come during the summer to see,” she tells Global News. “If you open the windows, all around is dust and you have to clean the house every day, two, three times even.”
Arbour says the high pollution is putting people’s health at risk.
“I believe it’s time to put a lid on this,” he said.
So he and his citizen’s group, Couvrons-Décarie, are trying to convince authorities to have the entire expressway covered. They say it’s been done in other cities, like Paris and Chicago, and there’s no reason why it can’t be done in Montreal. Furthermore, the space on top of a roof could be used.
“It could be green spaces, it could be housing, it could be stores,” he said. Arbour thinks a public-private partnership could be arranged to fund it.
NDG city councillor Peter McQueen is open to the idea and thinks it would improve the neighbourhood but cautions that it would be technically tricky.
“I’m not saying it’s impossible at all,” McQueen said. “Obviously, they’ve done it downtown when they built the convention centre and expanded the convention centre, so there are precedents of doing it.”
But he says because the highway is Transport Quebec’s jurisdiction, Arbour’s group should approach them. The group has started a petition to build support.
“I was very surprised — there’s a lot of people signing,” Arbour says. “I think we’ve created some kind of movement there.”
He’s optimistic the Decarie roof will get built, even if it doesn’t happen in his lifetime.