Commuters heed pleas to avoid Turcot, gridlock averted

Surprised officials report regular Monday rush hours

It was even a surprise to Quebec’s Transport Ministry that so many motorists seemed to heed the warnings of gridlock and stayed off the roads. Transport Quebec spokesperson Martin Girard said the department saw nothing remotely close to the eight kilometres of gridlock its traffic-prediction models had forecast. In some parts of the city, traffic was even lighter than normal for a Monday morning rush hour. “It’s certainly not within the worst scenarios that we anticipated,” Girard said Monday morning. “It’s going well. I think people took public transit and it also helped that it was a holiday for federal employees; that can affect the number of people on the road.” After a weekend with several closures around the Turcot Interchange, only two major access routes remained closed on Monday: the ramp leading to Highway 20 West from the Ville-Marie and the Ville-Marie access from Highway 20 East. The ramps were closed as crews working on the Turcot demolished a portion of the old Highway 15 North. The worst-hit parts of the region were expected to be the Mercier Bridge approach from the South Shore, Highway 13 in the West Island, the Metropolitain Expressway, and even the Champlain, Victoria and Jacques-Cartier Bridges. Monday morning, which was expected to be the worst moment of four days of major highway closures, turned out to be a regular rush hour, with some spots even seeing lighter-than-normal traffic. Cars were flowing freely toward the Ville-Marie from the Côte- StLuc Rd. entrance at 7:30 a.m. Traffic appeared to be flowing well after 8 a.m. on Highway 20 in both directions at Angrignon Blvd. Highway 15 in both directions south of St-Jacques St. was also working well. The relatively trouble-free morning rush was followed by a non-eventful return home Monday evening. Girard said perhaps the worst congestion during the closures was felt Friday night when there were three to four kilometres of congestion on the westbound Ville-Marie Expressway, where Highway 20 was closed, detouring motorists to the Décarie Expressway. Girard said Transport Quebec made several public appeals in the weeks prior, so people were aware of the situation before the closures. He said measures taken to entice more people to take public transit — like offering free tickets to employers who asked, and adding free parking and extra trains — paid off. It also helped that trucks were barred from Highway 20 between the Turcot and StPierre interchanges from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. and from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Demolishing the structure was no easy feat. At 25 metres high, the 113-metre by 10-metre section of the highway was directly above several new ramps built for the $3.7-billion Turcot project, and above train tracks that remained in service for merchandise trains and Via Rail trains over the weekend. Crews built a temporary bridge over the tracks and placed a steel deflector mounted onto a trailer on the closed lanes for Highway 20 West to keep rock from falling onto the new structure. There was a lot of rock that had to come down: 1,730 cubic metres of concrete, to be exact, Girard said. Most of the work was done over the weekend, leaving just the cleanup to complete on Monday. The next six months will see the majority of the structure come down, as crews say there will only be three per cent of the old structure remaining. Girard said more closures will be planned in the future, but he doesn’t expect any more major disruptions during a weekday.