There is no shortcut to get around Montreal’s road work this summer.
From quiet residential streets to the busiest highways, there appears to be no escaping the ongoing construction to rebuild the city’s ailing infrastructure.
Case in point: Highway 40 in the West Island. A $38 million construction project is underway to rebuild a section of the highway with a concrete surface on the eastbound lanes between Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue and Baie-D’Urfé.
It’s an area some users say is long overdue for improvement.
“I drive motorcycles sometimes and it was quite a rough road in certain areas. So it’s going to do some good,” Dominique Pilon, a user of this section of the highway, told Global News.
The work on this stretch requires occasional lane closures and drivers can expect delays.
More than 100,000 vehicles use this part of the highway on daily basis, according to Martin Girard, a spokesperson at Transports Québec.
But closing it entirely is out of the question as the highway is a critical link for commercial and leisure traffic between Quebec and Ontario.
“It’s a big challenge,” Girard said. “There’s a lot of traffic.”
The work on this section of the highway isn’t the only construction in the area and people living in a residential neighbourhood just north of Highway 40 have taken notice.
“If you go this way, you’ve got the REM station so you got big trucks going that way. And now they’re doing construction on that Chemin Sainte-Marie and the road over there. So like every way we try to get out of here, there’s construction,” David Wood, a Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue resident, told Global News.
The work here is expected to be finished by the end of 2022, but Transports Québec then plans to start similar work on another section of the highway further east.