Quality of city streets is in the eye of the beholder
Secret roadwork planning report shows ‘poor’ has murky definition
How will the city of Montreal be able to tell when it has caught up on repairing its 4,070 kilometres of roads and has brought them back to acceptable condition? The answer is more manipulable than you might think. Last week, Mayor Valérie Plante’s administration didn’t call attention to it, but it introduced a new yardstick — “the national average” — to measure when Montreal’s crumbling roads will be back up to snuff. The administration announced that it was shifting the city’s roadwork strategy away from massive repaving to focus on less extensive “people-friendly” roadwork. As a result, it said, Montrealers will have to wait until 2028 before the quality of the road network is brought up to “the national average” of 24 per cent of its roads being considered in poor and very poor shape. The “national average” is indeed a new yardstick to judge the state of Montreal’s roads. That’s because the city as far back as 2004 talked instead of bringing the roadwork network “to acceptable norms.” What the latter phrase means was summed up in Montreal’s 2005 operating budget, which laid out a 10-year plan for bringing the city’s roads up to standards. Ideally, it said, the city will bring the proportion of roads in bad condition down to four or five per cent, “which is an acceptable norm.” It may be that “acceptable” was more easily attainable in 2004. Only 14 per cent of the city’s road network was declared to be in poor condition at the time, without distinguishing between “poor” and “very poor.” That’s compared to 45 per cent in 2015, a proportion that would bust even a sliding scale. More recently, Plante’s predecessor, Denis Coderre, presented his own quality standard: the “elimination” of the city’s maintenance deficit that was the fault of previous administrations, which he pledged would happen in 2026. So the target for acceptable road performance is a shifting concept. In fact, a 2016 city report obtained by the Montreal Gazette through access-to-information reveals in writing just how pliable it can be.
The 21-page report, entitled “La rue en priorité” and written at the time that Coderre was mayor, reveals that the number of kilometres of Montreal streets judged to be in “poor” and “very poor” condition shot up sixfold between 2010 and 2015, and that most of the increase was due simply to the city applying more stringent provincial standards in the 2015 assessment of road quality instead of the city ’s own criteria that were used for the 2010 evaluation. The report says 1,818 kilometres of the city’s roads were found to be in “poor” or “very poor” condition in the 2015 diagnosis, versus 310 kilometres in the 2010 evaluation. The city’s roadwork maintenance deficit had therefore exploded, from $543 million in 2010 to $2.23 billion in 2015. However, the report says that two-thirds of the 1,818 kilometres that went from acceptable to “poor” or “very poor” between the two studies — or 1,000 kilometres — were downgraded only because criteria that the Quebec Municipal Affairs Department introduced for all municipalities to evaluate roads just before the 2015 study were “more restrictive” than those previously used by Montreal. And if the grade that’s given to a road network for its cracks and potholes can vary according to whose eyeglasses you’re wearing, then the report also reveals that what qualifies as a road that has been restored to norms can also be rendered flexible. In fact, the report — which is unsigned and bears a printing date of May 2016 — introduces the concept of “palliative resurfacing.” The report describes palliative resurfacing as applying new asphalt on poor condition roads that actually need reconstruction, without touching the sidewalks or the foundation. The document lauds the benefits of palliative resurfacing as a means to make it rapidly appear that the city has caught up on its long-standing maintenance deficit caused by years of underinvestment in its road, water and sewer infrastructure. The report also says the city introduced that type of rehabilitation on 44 kilometres of roads in 2015. The program, introduced by the Coderre administration, was supposed to extend the life span of roads by seven to 12 years while they await reconstruction. The report argues the city should favour the palliative approach in the short-term — until 2021 — and placate the public with smooth, driveable roads that cost less and take less time to achieve than reconstruction. The city can return to those bad roads to reconstruct them later on, it says. “Of the different assets studied in this document, roadwork presents the greatest maintenance deficit,” the report says. “It’s also the asset for which the public is the most sensitive and for which it has a high expectation for improvement in the short term. That’s why the city of Montreal is setting for itself an ambitious goal of having no remaining roadway with a maintenance deficit within five years, meaning by 2021, instead of in 10 years.” The target date to “eliminate the maintenance deficit” for water and sewer mains, it said, should nevertheless remain 2026. The report continues: “In this perspective, sections of street where the pavement is in ‘very bad shape’ and that should be reconstructed could be, as a first step, rehabilitated with a palliative resurfacing and undergo, a few years later, major work.” At that time, Montreal was already outsourcing all roadwork to private firms. Among other things, the report recommends expediting the contract-awarding There’s nothing political about maintaining a road. It’s fundamentally a service. process, notably by using uniform contract specifications, and reducing delays in paying contractors. The report also exhorts the city to introduce a second and even shorter-lasting palliative resurfacing program for the “most critical” roadways, which would extend their life by three to five years and “rapidly improve the condition of the pavement before doing major work on these sections of street.” The Coderre administration introduced such a road resurfacing program in 2017. “Even if the life span of an asset that is rehabilitated is less long than the life span of an asset that is reconstructed, the rehabilitation technique presents many advantages over reconstruction,” the 2016 report says. It lists: rehabilitation is faster than reconstruction, so shorter-term detours will limit “the inconveniences caused for citizens”; resurfacing costs less, so more kilometres of road can be done; and resurfacing causes less greenhouse gas emissions since no heavy equipment is required to excavate roads. The report’s subtitle calls it an investment plan to “eliminate the maintenance deficit” on roads, sewers and water mains. Coderre, who was mayor from 2013 to 2017, quoted a few figures that are in the report when he announced a $6.9-billion plan in October 2016 to redo 5,000 kilometres of roads, sewers and water mains by 2026 and eliminate the maintenance deficit. However, Coderre didn’t use the term “palliative resurfacing.” Still, Coderre’s 10-year plan and the “La rue en priorité” report appear to deviate from a five-year intervention plan that was also presented in 2016 by Montreal’s civil service. As reported last week, the 103page plan presented an “optimal” investment scenario for 2016 to 2020 and beyond that would see the city nearly triple its total annual investment in major repairs and reconstruction of its road, water and sewer networks. Even if it did so, Montreal’s roadwork maintenance deficit would only end in 2037 for arteries, and in 2047 for local streets. Moreover, road reconstruction was a significant target in the intervention plan, which said 889 kilometres required reconstruction between 2016 and 2020 at a cost of $1.89 billion. Another 1,637 kilometres required rehabilitation, at a cost of $990 million. The 21-page report refers to the intervention plan, and explains that ongoing engineering work and planning were leading to a “refining” of what was in it. That’s why some projections in the 21-page report “may differ,” it said, from the intervention plan. Peter Trent, the former mayor of Westmount, said he has never heard of “palliative resurfacing” and said he never heard about the explosion in the number of kilometres of road that are in “poor” and “very poor” condition. And he said he was surprised about what appears to be a frequent reversal in Montreal’s approach to roadwork. “It’s a moving target and clearly what’s happened here is whatever policy was there before the Coderre administration took over was changed (and) it seems whatever policy Coderre administration put forth is being reversed again,” Trent said. “There’s nothing political about maintaining a road. It’s fundamentally a service. And one would think that principles that were adopted many years ago would still apply and you wouldn’t change the entire philosophy every two or three years.”