Commuters on Decarie in Montreal on March 8, 2007.Christinne Muschi for The Globe and Mail
Every driver in Canada brakes for road repair during construction season, but few have seen the chaos that has blocked the Montreal commuter before summer has even arrived.
The annual season of motorway overhaul is on, but in Montreal, stunning emergency shutdowns of rusting major bridges and crumbling overpasses have paralyzed much of the city.
Real estate agents say suburban property values appear to be dropping with the emergence of horror stories about four-hour commutes. Company owners in Montreal say they are having trouble recruiting workers from the South Shore because of bridge closings.
This is before the looming $3-billion teardown and rebuild of a spaghetti interchange that already strangles much of Montreal's freeway system. (Parts of it were closed just a month ago for an emergency fix.) Work on the full reconstruction will last at least five years.
On top of all that, civic leaders have carried on merrily with summer festival street shutdowns and traffic re-organization designed to eliminate shortcuts on residential streets. Even bike paths are congested with commuters desperate to find another way.
"CHAOS," shouted the banner front-page headline in the sober Montreal newspaper La Presse.
On Thursday, Denis Poitras, an investment counsellor, spent 90 minutes stuck on the one-kilometre approach to the only fully functioning one of the three major spans leading south. This sort of wait is now frequent on even short downtown drives.
"You would think some of these closures could have been put off once the state of the bridges was known," said Mr. Poitras, who lives on the South Shore but travels all over Montreal to meet clients. "Once again, there seems to be a horrendous lack of co-ordination in planning in this city."
While other Canadian cities have heard warnings about aging infrastructure, the situation in Montreal is "truly extraordinary," said Saeed Mirza, an expert on infrastructure and professor at McGill University. "Everything is deteriorating."
Calling out warnings on Montreal's crumbling concrete and rusting steel has been Prof. Mirza's vocation for much of his career. He was mostly ignored until 2006, when an overpass built 40 years ago collapsed, killing five people.
The province stepped up inspections, which led this week to the discovery that the southbound portion of the twin Mercier Bridge could collapse due to rust. Holes opened up in the roadbed in the other half of the bridge on Friday, shutting it down, too.
"Have you seen photos of the Mercier? They are horrible. Corrosion is so extensive, it's hard to imagine it wasn't flagged before," Prof. Mirza said.
This is all in addition to warnings this spring that the Champlain Bridge might fall down. Replacing it became an issue in the federal election campaign, even as millions in short-term repairs are about to begin.
Government officials barely rise to defend the overall quality of Montreal's system of highways and bridges any more, emphasizing instead that they've pledged billions for improvements.
"The bridge won't collapse tomorrow," Transport Minister Sam Hamad said as he announced the initial Mercier closing earlier this week.
Many of Montreal's freeways and bridges were completed in a rush during the good times of the 1950s and 1960s, as the Expo '67 deadline loomed, Prof. Mirza said. Quality control was poor and much of it is falling apart all at once.
Water and sewer pipes attract less attention, but they are in equally bad shape, Prof. Mirza said.
"I've been preaching for years that maintenance must not be deferred, at any cost. We have to get away from the present philosophy of design, build and forget. This is what happens."