I think people are exagerating about Montreal's infrastructure now. There is the new Turcot, new airport highways, the new champlain bridge, highway 30 and future highway 40 reconstruction, the REM and tunnel reconstruction.

That is absolutely true about the Turcot interchange (the largest in the country), but the whole thing is being redone at a cost of more than 4 billions, so it should be brand new in a couple of years. The province and the city are investing massive amounts of money in the city's infrastructure.

cool! do you know where the new terminal could be built? I heard maybe between current terminal and runway 10-28?

What I've read is north of the 10-28, and the REM will go underneath so an additional metro station is a possibility for the airport.

The city of Montreal alone is spending 1G$ a year, just to renovate old infrastructure.

The Métropolitaine doesn't look very good (or even reassuring) from underneath, though much of the Gardiner in Toronto isn't really in better shape.

It's reconstruction is already planned in the next years. Will cost nearly 10G$ when completed.

Not to derail the airport thread, but somebody should call the auditors if a highway reconstruction costs $10 billion or the replacement of a complex interchange costs $4 billion.

Many Torontonians are [rightly] upset that a 1 stop, 6 km subway extension will cost $3.5 billion. Similarly, a lot of Vancouverites are balking at the $3.5 billion cost of the Massey Tunnel replacement (a 3 km long, 10 lane cable-stayed bridge with new interchanges on both sides). But these Montreal costs are approaching New York City levels of infrastructure inflation.

Euh... they will spend 10 billion dollars on the Met?

I'm surprised it's only that. That thing is huge.


The reconstruction of the met will be one of the biggest construction sites this country has ever seen. And the implications for the dozens of neighbourhoods that straddle it will be huge.

It will also be an opportunity to build a forward-thinking transport corridor merging trucking, cars and who knows rapid transit?

Maybe 10G$ = Gazillion

G is the letter used in French for billion. M is for million as in English.

Euh, it's the international standard for billion? G = giga $ = dollars, 1G$ is a billion dollars?

You are talking about a 20km, mostly elevated highway. That costs a fortune alone to demolish, even more to rebuild.

The Turcot projet is on 8km and is not only one interchange.

The international standard everywhere but Anglo North America, that is.

Kind of like the date. Is today 14-06-17 or 06-14-17? :shrug:

Well people use it in English Canada, like I make 50k$ a year. And today is 17-06-14 (lower units at the end).

Yeah, they use K for thousands, but Anglo-Canada definitely doesn't use Gs for billions.

I agree about the date. 2017-06-14 is even better (clearer).

I still think that 10 billion dollars to rebuild an elevated highway seems like overkill. Even though I'm not from Montreal, I'm quite familiar with the stretch of road we're talking about - it's more like 14 km, not 20 km, between the Decarie and the A-25. Anything on either side of those two roads is in pretty good shape.

Even if you scrupulously check every line item in the budget and the $10 billion figure makes "sense", the bigger question is whether it's worth it to spend 10 billion dollars without any real gains to Montreal's transportation network. Even if you think it's worth investing in urban highways (I don't), this is not really the addition of a new route, but the retrofitting of an existing one.

Is it worth spending $1,250 per Montrealer (or $2,500 per Quebecker) to shave off a few minutes in travel time or gain - maybe - 100,000 AADT? Are the urban surface roads designed to handle the excess traffic? Do the residents of these neighbourhoods recognize that this is where a lot of the additional traffic will go? Is it wise to invest this amount of money in urban highway infrastructure on the eve of an autonomous car revolution?

I don't buy that the public transit component would be worth the added cost; the blue line is literally 500 meters to the south - the Mascouche commuter train (which could really be enhanced) is barely 2 km to the north. Rapid transit along a highway ROW is generally a failure. There are many parts of Greater Montreal that are crying out for rapid transit, but this isn't one of them. If they want to enhance the area's livability, they could always demolish the Met and replace it with an urban boulevard at considerably less cost. After all, it's not like Montreal lacks for bypass roads, or that long distance truckers traveling from the industrial areas near the airport to the rest of Quebec are out of alternate routes (Greater Montreal has 5 east-west freeways - same number as Los Angeles).

Montrealers: I don't want to slag on your city, but for a place that has one of the highest public transit and active transport mode shares on the continent, your government sure is spending a lot of money on highways. Quebec highway construction has a history of graft and corruption, so don't consider me surprised that the $10B bill - astonishing as it is - might even go up.

PS: A lot of this discussion should be moved to the Highways thread.

The recent independant studies and construction costs in Quebec are historically lower than Ontario or BC. Quebec had corruption investigations, not the other provinces...

Also all of these projects are to rebuild as-is (as in same traffic flow). New highways were tolled as to minimize government investments.

The cost of the rebuilding was pegged at 7.9G$, which I rounded up to 10G$. Still a lot of money, but it's a major major reconstruction project.

Just to demolish the Champlain Bridge structure, it will cost more than 500M$ (being paid by the feds), and that's only a km (cantilever part of the bridge).

Actually, I've never noticed the currency logo being used last. I suspect you're confusing a French thing with an International vs Anglo Canada thing.