Tag Archives: Transport in Montreal

A few things every Montrealer ought to know about Mirabel International Airport {Updated – May 2014}

Recent news is that the unelected government agency responsible for Montreal’s airports will seek to demolish the iconic main terminal of Mirabel International Airport, effectively shutting the door on ever using it again. The terminal has been abandoned, but maintained, since passenger flights ceased using the airport in 2004, and apparently this costs somewhere in the vicinity of $5 million annually.

I’m of the mind this is a colossal mistake and I’ve modified a previously published article to point out why. Enjoy.

1. We still need it.

Montréal is a major international tourism destination in addition to being a key port of entry for immigrants and refugees. Our city is growing as is interest in our city, this is undeniable. As we stimulate our development and continue on our path to becoming a truly global city, we will require an airport that can handle a steadily increasing number of passengers. Such an airport will grow, by necessity, to serve a steadily increasing population base and will stimulate industrial development around it.

I’m looking at this with a long-term perspective. Traffic congestion around Trudeau airport is bad as it is and without major changes to local transport infrastructure will only get worse. There’s no room to build additional runways or terminals and, because the airport is surrounded by residential housing, the airport has a curfew limiting its hours of operation. It’s more-or-less at capacity.

And at a certain point in our city’s future, the land the airport currently occupies will be more valuable as residential housing than as an airport. Demand for on-island residential property will increase with the cost of oil, and all the factors that once made Trudeau airport’s location ideal for air travel will, in the future, make it an ideal place to own a house.

Mirabel, by contrast, is located in a rural area with plenty of room to grow. Built away from the city, Mirabel can operate twenty-four hours a day and purpose-built infrastructure can be implemented so as to make access to the airport efficient and effective across the metropolitan region. Similar infrastructure redevelopment in Dorval is proving exceptionally difficult to implement.

When considering what to do with Mirabel, we should be thinking about our future needs.

2. It’s becoming more accessible.

The lack of access that lead to Mirabel’s demise is either currently being implemented, in use, or otherwise still on the drawing board.

Highway 50 from the National Capital Region (population 1.4 million) has been completed, and it intersects Highway 15 near Mirabel. There are many more international flights available from Montreal than from Ottawa and this is a market a resurrected Mirabel could have access to.

The AMT runs trains between Montréal and Mirabel, on a track which can access the Deux-Montagnes Line (and by extension Gare Centrale), in addition to the Parc Intermodal Station. The train station at the airport has already been completed. We’re closer to realizing high-speed rail access to the airport than we realize – the problem is that we’re focusing on the wrong airport. Completing Highway 50 so that it connects with Highway 40 near Repentigny will allow a northern bypass to mirror the now completed Highway 30 southern bypass of the Island of Montreal. And what better way to justify the construction of a new South Shore span than by simultaneously completing Highways 13 and 19? This way, the Montréal metropolitan region would be served by four East-West Highways intersected by a similar number of North-South Highways. A ring-road would be created, and Mirabel would finally be able to adequately serve the entire metropolitan region. And that’s just the highways. While the Fed claims high-speed rail is an expensive dream, the government of Ontario is pressing ahead with the development of a new high-speed rail system connecting Toronto with London.

I’m convinced this is precisely how high speed rail will be (re)introduced to Canada – the provinces will get the ball rolling on specific, tactical, routes which will ideally blossom into a federal system. So why not do the same here?

A bullet train running between Downtown Montreal and Mirabel could lead to the creation of a high speed rail link between Mirabel and Ottawa. A high speed train travelling at 320km/hour could run the distance between Ottawa and Mirabel in about thirty minutes. From Gare Centrale to Mirabel, the trip could be done in less than half that time.

Imagine a future Montreal in which international travel was as close to you as the nearest Métro station and didn’t require finding parking or calling a cab?

Imagine a future in which Mirabel didn’t just serve Metropolitan Montreal better, but the National Capital Region as well?

3. Competing with Pearson

Competition is economically healthy, so why not develop an airport that can compete with Toronto’s Pearson? Low jet-fuel prices and longer-range aircraft made stopping at Mirabel unnecessary in the 1980s and 1990s and gave rise to Pearson Int’l Airport in Toronto as chief Canadian gateway. Today, fuel prices are high and unstable. Mirabel is 600km (give or take) closer to Europe, Africa, the Middle East and a number of important cities on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. I think we could use some competition in terms of which city is the true eastern gateway to the country, and I’d honestly like to see what would happen if we pushed ahead with Mirabel to take business away from Pearson. It’s what capitalism is all about right? Better public transit access to strategically situated airports able to adapt to new technologies will define the gateways of tomorrow, and for this reason Mirabel is superior to Pearson in many respects. Let’s see what the free market has to say about it. Again, Pearson, though large, is nearing capacity and constrained from large-scale growth by what has already grown up beside it. And we can’t grow unless we have the infrastructure to allow for growth. So whereas the citizens of Toronto may one day have to plan an entirely new airport even further away from the city centre, all we have to do re-connect our airport to our metropolitan ‘circulatory system’. The advantage will soon be ours.

4. Mirabel wasn’t designed to fail – we let it fail.

Fixing it is still a possibility, but we need to act quickly so we can save what’s already been built. We don’t want to have to start from scratch at some point in the future because we lacked foresight today – that’s criminally negligent economic policy. We spent a lot of money in the past and haven’t seen a decent return on our investment. So, invest anew – but invest in fixing the problems already identified first and foremost. Whatever the initial cost, it cannot compare to the potential return a fully operational Mirabel would provide in terms of direct revenue and indirect economic stimulus. There are no mistakes, just innovative solutions. If we were really smart, we’d recognize that planned regional transit and transport projects can be brought together under a larger program to provide the access necessary to make Mirabel a viable solution to our airport problem. Ultimately, it’s all inter-related and could stimulate a multitude of key sectors of our local economy.

We were once a daring and imaginative people, we had bold ideas and planned on a grand scale. Somewhere along the way we became convinced we were no longer capable of performing at the same level, and settled into a holding pattern of socio-political malaise. Today we are restless, and we are daring to ask how we came to be, and where our former power came from. Of late, it seems that we’ve regained our swagger, our attitude. So let us push those in power to dream big once more, and push for the long-term, multi-generational city-building we were once so good at. We have it in our blood, but our pride is still damaged. Let us regain our spirit by turning our past failures into tomorrow’s successes.

Covering Over Modernity

VM97-3_01-028

This here’s a photo of what Montreal looked like back in the early 1930s.

To situate yourself, first you’re looking ‘Montreal east’ – that’s the Jacques-Cartier Bridge under construction, and by my guess I think the airplane was flying near the intersection of Rue de la Montagne and Boulevard Saint-Jacques, or Mountain and St. James as it was colloquially referred to back then.

This is Montreal right before the Depression really began to be felt in Canada, and right after about fifty years of considerable and near constant economic growth for our city.

This is Montreal back when Canada had but one metropolis.

This is Montreal back when it defined what metropolis meant in the Canadian context.

If you stare at this photo long enough you’ll see all that remains, and there’s a lot all things considered.

But consider as well that just about everything in the lower half of the photo is gone.

You can see the transition here (not my work, but hat’s off to the responsible party).

In the contrast you can see the effect of monumental construction projects and just how much space is actually eaten up by the Ville-Marie Expressway.

The depopulation of the central core of our city is clear, but so too is the amount of space we demand on an individual level also glaringly apparent. Back in the 1930s there was a lot more happening, so much more life, packed tighter together. At the top of the picture is more-or-less the limit of the ‘urban’ montreal of the day, and it wouldn’t have extended much father in other directions either.

This is back when NDG was the suburbs.

Montreal’s population was recorded at just under one million people in 1931, and you can imagine the majority of those people would have lived and worked in the area photographed above.

Montreal witnessed a steady decline in population between 1971 and 2001, from our all-time high of 1,766,000 to 1,583,000 at the start of the new millennium. The city lost 183,000 people, largely to suburbanization, during that thirty-year period. Concurrently, the city deindustrialized (as other major North American cities did at the time) and gave up considerable tracts of land to highways and parking lots, facilitating the new white collar workers who worked in the new corporate office towers of the urban core.

It’s unfortunate, because we’ll never have this kind of urban density again, and as a consequence I doubt we’ll ever be able to truly replicate the urban lifestyle aesthetic of our first metropolitan era.

René Lévesque Boulevard as it appeared circa 1962, looking east from about Bishop
René Lévesque Boulevard as it appeared circa 1962, looking east from about Bishop

This is downtown Montreal at the beginning of the 1960s. Here you can see the effect cars had on redesigning the city, as what was once an elegant and small street (Dorchester) was transformed into a major urban traffic artery. Dorchester, now Boul. René-Lévesque, was widened starting in the mid-1950s to make way for the new commuter class driving in from neighbourhoods located much farther away than had ever previously been convenient. As ‘Gilded Age’ mansions were torn down they were replaced with massive new buildings, such as the Tour CIBC (seen above, the slender slate-grey tower), Place Ville-Marie etc.

In all the renderings of exposed highway trenches developed for the city, they all sort of look like this - like canals in an American Venice
In all the renderings of exposed highway trenches developed for the city, they all sort of look like this – like canals in an American Venice

Hand-in-hand with the redevelopment of Dorchester came the construction of a major east-west highway, today known as the Ville-Marie Expressway. The Ville-Marie was a success in one manner of thinking because so much of it was put underground (as opposed to above ground, such as Metropolitan Boulevard north of the mountain), meaning it could be eventually covered over again. Unfortunately this took a lot longer and had a more deleterious effect than city planners had imagined. In the 1960s, when planning and construction of the Ville-Marie began, there was this idea, as you can see in the above rendering, that the new ‘sunken’ highway would take the form of a post-modern canal, stimulating new growth immediately next to it. This didn’t really happen as developers were disinclined to build right next to an open highway trench. Moreover, planners back in the 1960s failed to realize just how unappealing an open highway trench would actually be for all the people walking around above.

View of exposed sections of Ville-Marie Expressway, from the Tour de la Bourse, circa 2000
View of exposed sections of Ville-Marie Expressway, from the Tour de la Bourse, circa 2000

This is what the Ville-Marie looked like right before the first serious efforts to recover the lost land actually began. Notice that parts weren’t completely open – the tunnel roof is visible – but that for whatever reason no efforts had been made to reclaim this space. This would change at the start of the new century with the planned redesign of Victoria Square and the development of the Quartier Internationale.

The exposed section, recovered. Notice the CDP Capital building lower left corner, and the enlargement of the Palais des Congrès, over the former exposed tunnel
The exposed section, recovered. Notice the CDP Capital building lower left corner, and the enlargement of the Palais des Congrès, over the former exposed tunnel

During 2002-2003 the square was completely redesigned, concurrently with the construction of the CDP Capital Centre, the enlargement of the Palais des Congrès and the construction of Place Riopelle between the two. All of this was located atop the tunnel. The CDP Capital Centre is particularly impressive (and I’d encourage you to visit it during normal business hours) as the architect designed a building that sits atop the tunnel but doesn’t place any weight on it – the atrium is in fact located directly above the tunnel, with the weight of the building pushed off on to either side.

At around the same time, the Underground City was extended to connect the once separate eastern and western axes through this area. Arguably the most impressive and least used parts of the RÉSO can be found here.

So clearly it is possible to build on top of the tunnel/trench.

The question comes down to cost.

The last remaining exposed  part of the trench - a prime location for new construction
The last remaining exposed part of the trench – a prime location for new construction

This is the remaining open part of the Ville-Marie Expressway, between the new CHUM superhospital and the Palais des Congrès. As you can see, it’s a considerable amount of space. Mayor Denis Coderre wants to build a park atop the highway trench on the easternmost portion. Transport Quebec, the provincial transport ministry, has said, unequivocally, no. They argue it will cost too much without giving any idea as to what they think it will cost.

This is called ‘convenient political obstructionism. It isn’t the plan they don’t like, it’s that the Mayor of Montreal is planning it and, for reasons that still make no sense to me, a highway used almost exclusively by Montrealers is outside the jurisdiction of City Hall.

When the mayor can’t decide to build a park on top of a highway trench without running it through the often anti-Montreal Québec government, you know there’s a problem.

And as to the other two-thirds of the trench, well, there’s enough space here to build an entirely new Palais des Congrès (not that I’d advocate for another convention centre in the same space, but simply to illustrate just how much area we’re actually talking about).

It strikes me as odd the city, province and various private developers couldn’t get together and devise a plan to cover over this remaining section. If costs are as prohibitive as the province seems to believe, then perhaps the recovering job ought to be a public-private partnership. Get private developers to front part of the cost so that they can get the rights to build above. Something tells me this would be an excellent location both for office towers and condominiums, given that this open hole happens to be in the middle of just about everything. I can imagine living and working here would appeal to a lot of people.

The next phase - this is passed for a park on top of a highway in 1982; neat idea, poor execution, worse location.
The next phase – this is passed for a park on top of a highway in 1982; neat idea, poor execution, worse location.

And just in case there’s any doubt it can be done, it has been done before. The Agora pictured above is probably one of our city’s least used (and enigmatic) public spaces because it’s terribly uninviting. Moreover, due to its design and the relative poverty of the surrounding area for far too many years, it was taken over by local homeless people. My first apartment in Montreal was right in front of it and throughout the summer the entirety of Viger Square was a makeshift homeless campground. The single biggest problem with the public spaces created above the Ville-Marie in the late 1970s and early 1980s is that lines of sight across the spaces are blocked by walls and hedges.

I don’t want to see the Agora torn down because I think it might work very well in another part of town, but the fact remains, these places aren’t being used as best they can.

Especially considering the creation of the Ville-Marie Expressway caused the stately Viger Square to be destroyed.
Especially considering the creation of the Ville-Marie Expressway caused the stately Viger Square to be destroyed.

What I’d like to see is large, green, urban parks with clear sight lines across, much like Viger Square before it was demolished to excavate for the Ville-Marie. Given the new housing built in the area in the last decade, I think it would be wiser to create a more traditional green space in this area and move the post-modern agora a little closer to the city centre. I think the agora would work much better in an area in which thru-traffic can be guaranteed and stimulated. This is simply impossible where it currently stands largely because it’s bounded by two major boulevards and there’s not much going on in its current location to stimulate the much needed ‘ballet of the streets’.

All that said – this is our city, our highway, our public spaces and ultimately our problem. The effort to remove the scar left by our efforts to modernize fifty some-odd years ago has only been partially achieved. In order to build a more cohesive city, and further to beautify it and increase population density, we must be given the tools to be masters of our own domain.

Maitres chez nous…

Even More Champlain Bridge Blues

Superpoutre in place - credit to Robert Skinner, La Presse
Superpoutre in place – credit to Robert Skinner, La Presse

Superpoutre… guess we can all add that one to the lexicon. I have a feeling it may become quite common.

For the uninitiated, the ‘Superpoutre‘ or superbeam (a 75-tonne steel reinforcement beam), was successfully installed on the Champlain Bridge over the weekend, meaning motorists are safe to continue risking their lives to get to Brossard.

Mark my words, the Fed’s going to slowly reinforce the entire bridge with a steel exoskeleton until there’s basically a new bridge and the Champlain Bridge replacement project falls through completely (doubtless with many billions of dollars spent anyway).

Suffice it to say I’m suspicious, nay, deeply cynical, of anything promised by the Tories, especially if, as they said yesterday, they’re planning on completing a new bridge three years earlier than initially anticipated. This, from the same party that hasn’t delivered a single warship, icebreaker, fighter or maritime helicopter, despite their many, nay constant, assertions that they’re being as expeditious and fiscally responsible as possible concerning those particular major acquisitions. The truth, the reality, is the exact opposite. They’ve squandered time and money without producing a single thing throughout most if not all their years in office.

And now they want us to believe we’re getting a ten-lane bridge with an integrated light-rail system (and a toll) in four years?

Buddy have I got something to sell you…

Political Considerations

Perhaps the Tories are looking to pick up South Shore ridings in 2015…

Or perhaps it’s more subtle than that… just a simple reminder of who’s boss, who gets things done. I can’t help but see this as anything but more political theatre. Maybe they’re not interested in winning in the suburbs (à la Toronto and Vancouver, and here too, albeit twenty-five years ago) as much as they might want to undermine local confidence in the main opposition parties and their leaders, both of whom represent urban Montreal ridings. Heck, if there’s nothing going a year from now, maybe we won’t have any faith left in government at all. That kind of disengagement can make any election a cinch for the incumbent.

During Question Period today, when asked why there was no money set aside in the budget to actually pay the cost of construction, Infrastructure Minister Denis Lebel said that money was available, that he was aware, as he put it, that motorists were praying to god every time they crossed over and that the Federal government cared deeply about the safety of motorists etc. His announcement Sunday, equally calculated, included a provision for light rail that he had previously denied. The request for such a provision was a sticking point in negotiations between the Fed and the Marois government, which as recently as last Thursday was demanding that the entire bridge replacement project by transferred to the provincial government.

Lebel returned that the Fed would be amenable to transferring control of Montreal’s bridges to the province after the new Champlain is completed. Mayor Denis Coderre was unenthusiastic, and I can only imagine Marois et al is upset they’ve been beaten to the punch and that a toll is part of the package regardless of their thoughts on the issue (someone’s gonna pay fer dat bridge).

In any event, Lebel is also promising that the new bridge will have ‘architectural appeal’ despite axing the planned architectural design competition (which was apparently allocated about half the overall time for the project before the new schedule). Danish architect Poul Ove Jensen has been hired to oversee bridge construction, ARUP Canada will provide engineering services with Provencher Roy will provide architectural consultation.

No bid, mind you. ARUP Canada Inc. was awarded a $15 million contract to provide these services back on October 28th. Lebel’s justification of the choice (or lack thereof) was that this particular group effectively provided the simplest, most cost-efficient solution.

As to the choice of architect, well once again the federal government looks everywhere but our own backyard. Call me a patriot, I’d prefer our new bridge be designed by someone who actually lives here.

As you’re no doubt aware, our city has bad luck when importing foreign design and construction methods.

Plus que ça change…

The Olympic Stadium, much like the Olympic Village, was designed for the climate of Southern France, not cold, snowy, windy, rainy ‘providing all seasons with gusto’ Montreal. The concrete used on both structures have both been negatively impacted by our winters, and this is saying nothing of the stadium’s ill-conceived roof. Similarly, the long concrete causeway that connects the steel portion of the bridge with Nun’s Island was built by a French company that also didn’t take into account local winter conditions – namely by not including a method to drain away accumulations of highly corrosive salted slush on the roadway. These modifications weren’t made until many decades after the bridge was built, by which point the damage had already been done.

And why did this French company get the job? Because it had the lowest bid.

Instead of using steel girders (like the recently-installed Superpoutre) they proposed an innovative (perhaps experimental) steel-cable reinforced concrete solution for the construction of the Champlain Bridge’s support structures. The concrete is so enmeshed with the high-tension cables it’s nearly impossible to fully replace existing beams, and so it looks like the only long-term solution to keep the bridge running until its replacement is complete is to do exactly what’s been done for many years already – 24/7 inspection and monitoring, patch-up jobs here and there, regular lane closures and occasional major repairs such as the one we just experienced.

A bridge that’s impossible to adequately repair built with a material nearly guaranteed to fail. You’d almost think it was a con…

I’m anxious to find out some technical information about this new bridge, like what shape it will take, how it will span the Seaway and what materials will be used, but given the architect’s other designs you can expect something neutral, inoffensive though perhaps ill-suited for the aesthetic of the city. Consider that all our steel bridges seem to be holding up just fine (and have done so for many more years than the Champlain), and that the world’s best steelworkers live just across the Mercier Bridge in Kanawake.

Isn’t it a bit odd we use so much drab, cheap, ineffective concrete in local construction when we have access to a superior material and internationally recognized workmanship?

Incidentally, the Danish architect is well known for using reinforced concrete, not steel.

Plus que ça change.

In any event, to wrap this all up, I’m not convinced we’re going to get what we need in the end, and I’m unimpressed with the project so far.

It seems like the Fed is making the same old mistakes – everything from not using a Canadian to design the bridge to not having an architectural contest of any duration to not having an open bid and apparently sticking with the absolute cheapest option. Oh yeah, and then there’s the expected re-use of a potentially flawed construction material.

This isn’t a good way to start a rush job.

And it seems to have only become a rush job for largely political purposes, which is worse still.

And we haven’t even yet discussed the sum – expected clock in anywhere from $3 to $5 billion – nor whether that money might be better spent elsewhere in the grand scheme of things (and where does the Champlain Bridge’s maintenance budget come from, and how long will that bridge definitively last?)

Final note; we never even stopped to consider if we really needed a bridge at all. Tunnels, in most cases, can last far longer than bridges, and in our local case, could likely be built cheaper than a bridge using a proven technique utilizing prestressed concrete segments to create an immersed tube.

So when you get right down to it, my question is still, fundamentally, this: why aren’t we building another Lafontaine Tunnel instead of a new Champlain Bridge?