In French they’re called “chicken nests,” but Montreal’s potholes could house much larger creatures.
Ostrich nests would be a better name, some residents have suggested. Or pterodactyl nests.
Many of Montreal’s streets are horribly disfigured this winter, with deep pockmarks dotting the pavement. Others seem to be crumbling away to nothing. Drivers slow to a crawl as they edge their cars around the craters, or swerve out of their lanes to avoid them. The lucky ones do, anyway.
Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada was not so lucky. Hours after calling the state of Montreal’s streets “catastrophic” last week, her car went over a couple of potholes and suffered two flat tires. She posted a video to social media as she waited for a tow truck.
“I know the streets don’t make any sense,” she said.
Railing against potholes is a long-standing pastime in Montreal. The “nids-de-poule” are almost as emblematic of the city as its much-beloved bagels and its much-maligned orange traffic cones – which are sometimes used to mark especially dangerous potholes.
Even with Montreal’s strong claim to have the worst roads in Canada, this winter is particularly treacherous. Pothole-related calls to the city were up five times this year over last, even before Ms. Martinez Ferrada’s incident touched off a public outcry.
In response to the crisis, the city has announced an “emergency solution,” which involves hiring crews to fill in the potholes using shovels – a temporary fix until the spring.
But that seems unlikely to satisfy angry drivers, one of whom recently told La Presse that driving in Montreal gives her “an immersive daily experience worthy of a postapocalyptic video game.” A Journal de Montréal columnist has even called for a public inquiry.
On Reddit, one user, comparing the streets to another cratered surface, summed up the situation in one word: “Moontreal.”
'I don’t understand potholes here,' says Montrealer Hocine Benayache, whose car hit one a few weeks ago.
One Montreal driver, Hocine Benayache, never saw the pothole that he hit one evening last month on busy Jean-Talon Street, though he certainly felt it. He kept driving until he heard the telltale flapping of a flat tire.
The impact was powerful enough that the car’s rear rim was bent. The only upside, he said in a recent interview, was that he impressed his wife by changing the flat himself at -15 C.
“I don’t understand potholes here,” said Mr. Benayache, who moved to Montreal from Algeria almost three years ago. “They’re just so deep and sharp. That’s what causes the damage.”
Every city complains about its potholes, but there is some evidence to suggest Montreal’s really are worse. In 2021, a Canadian Automobile Association study found that Quebec’s road conditions cost an average of $258 a vehicle annually in unplanned repairs and other expenses, said Nicolas Ryan, public affairs director for CAA-Québec. The Canadian average was just $126.
Between Jan. 9 and Feb. 2, calls to CAA-Québec about flat tires were up 46 per cent provincewide compared with last year, Mr. Ryan said. In Montreal, the “epicentre of potholes,” calls spiked 73 per cent over last year, he said.
The abysmal state of Montreal’s roads this winter is partly due to a stretch of warm weather in January, Mr. Ryan said. The subsequent freeze caused the asphalt to crack and crumble. Montreal’s large-scale snow-removal operations can also be hard on streets, he added.
Every winter, the snow piles high at Montreal's dump sites; this was last year's pile at Angrignon in late February. Clearing the snow is one source of road damage, as are whipsaw changes in temperature.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Notre-Dame East was No. 1 in last year's CAA-Québec ranking of the worst Montreal roads.
Ms. Martinez Ferrada has pointed to equipment shortages as part of the problem. Some of the city’s fleet of pothole-patching machines have recently been out of commission and a private-sector contract expired in December – hence the emergency shovelling.
Still, Montreal’s potholes have been a citywide fixation for years. In 2015, the Montreal Gazette published an editorial declaring that potholes “need not be inevitable.” Four years later, perhaps inevitably, the same paper ran a column titled “Montreal’s inability to fix pothole problem defies logic.”
For anyone looking, alternate explanations abound. Some corners of the internet blame the potholes on a city too intent on building bike lanes – though Montreal’s cyclists have also been complaining. Others point to the history of corruption in Quebec’s construction industry that prompted a public inquiry more than a decade ago. Mr. Ryan said it’s high time Quebec had a conversation about how its roads are built, including the principle of awarding contracts to the lowest bidder.
The situation has gotten so dire that Télé-Québec released a feature-length documentary last fall about the state of Quebec’s roads, titled Nid-de-poule. It points out that Quebec has a much smaller population than Ontario, meaning there are fewer people paying taxes to maintain its vast network of roads.
But after an hour and 21 minutes of investigation, the documentary reaches a less-than-surprising conclusion: The roads are bad because people have let them get bad. “We built roads and neglected them,” Mr. Ryan said. “And today, unfortunately, we are paying the price.”
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