'there is no big picture' for roadwork in montreal
8 minute read
the borough of verdun spent six months to build a bike path on de verdun st. the work was completed in 2024. then the city arrived this summer and dug up part of the street to rehabilitate a water main and replace lead pipes.
allen mcinnis
/
montreal gazette
montrealers who think the city does construction work over and over on the same streets: it’s not your imagination.
the gazette has reviewed a handful of recent roadwork projects to understand how and why this phenomenon occurs.
in one case, for example, verdun borough spent six months building a 2.8-kilometre bike path on de verdun st. from 2023 to 2024. then the city arrived this summer to rehabilitate an underground water main and replace lead service lines in front of two dozen residences. the result: the city cut holes in a 425-metre stretch, did repair work that had been scheduled before the path was built, then closed the holes. the work left sections of the path closed to cyclists this summer and residents, who had navigated detours and cones in 2023 and 2024, had to once again manage those obstacles as well as endure water service interruptions.
“they knew they had to do underground work and the bike path wouldn’t be usable,” said gisella gesuale, president of the association des scientifiques et ingénieurs de montréal (asim), the union representing montreal’s in-house engineers.
“why not plan it in a sequence? you find yourself in a situation where people can’t use what you said was urgent to put in place.”
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when the city does construction on a street but omits to replace the lead pipes, that’s short-term thinking, gesuale said.
it’s no wonder that montreal recently pushed its target to replace all lead service lines in the city from 2032 to 2040, she said.
“there’s no big picture,” gesuale said.
“it’s the citizens that pay. they pay by (their tax) money and they pay by the fact that the same roads are always closed.”
there were big hopes for valérie plante — montreal’s self-proclaimed “mayor of mobility” — when she and her projet montréal party were elected to power in november 2017 and pledged to “get montrealers moving again.”
but eight years later, those damned orange cones are still everywhere.
and eight years later, the issue of how the city manages roadwork has imposed itself as a key issue in the montreal election campaign, with polls showing it to be a top concern for voters. all of the mayoral candidates, including plante’s projet montréal successor, luc rabouin, have made promises to do a better job on handling roadwork and the ubiquitous cones.
montreal auditor general andrée cossette has also weighed in on the city’s poor management of roadwork, concluding in her latest annual report that the city has no proper system to co-ordinate construction sites and suffers from “siloed management” that renders interventions ineffective. without robust management, she said, the city can’t ensure adequate maintenance of its streets, which she noted have deteriorated in the past two years.
the city returned to de verdun st. in 2025 and made cuts in the bike path built the year before to rehabilitate a water main and replace lead service lines. this photo shows de verdun between 1st and 2nd aves. this summer.
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moreover, the usual excuse given by occupants of city hall over the last 20 years for the never-ending construction — that they’re making up for the infrastructure maintenance deficit of their predecessors — has worn thin. after all, montrealers have been navigating a sea of orange cones for the same 20 years.
there has been no shortage of money pumped into infrastructure in all those years, so the issue seems to lie in how the city organizes the work.
for gesuale’s union, one of the common threads running through the cases presented by the gazette is poor co-ordination of the underground and above-ground interventions. another common element, it says, is the precedence given to “political” and observable priorities, like bike paths, at the cost of invisible items, such as replacing lead service lines.
the city, in its defence, points to the urgency to make dangerous streets safe for cyclists and pedestrians and the complexity of scheduling projects with other roadwork on neighbouring streets.
the city tries to minimize waste and duplication as much as possible when it begins with above-ground interventions ahead of underground interventions, city spokesperson hugo bourgoin said. for example, during the construction of the verdun bike path, the section that was scheduled to have underground infrastructure repaired wasn’t paved in anticipation of that work, he said.
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“although the sequence of work you are referring to is not ideal, it is important to note that the various projects were not planned separately,” bourgoin said of de verdun.
repeated roadwork due to a lack of co-ordination is nothing new in montreal. but 15 years ago, the controversies were over utility companies tearing open newly reconstructed roads.
that sort of misstep still happens on occasion, a recent example being de brébeuf st. in plateau-mont-royal. hydro-québec installed a pole after the city finished reconstruction, and the commission des services électriques de montréal recently reopened a section of the street so the utility company can connect a customer to the pole.
(the city’s contractor also returned recently to finish installing traffic lights after a complication with the location of underground lines delayed the work last year.)
the city “attempted to co-ordinate the work with (hydro-québec), but despite several reminders the latter did not respect the deadline for carrying out its work,” bourgoin said. the commission is paying the related costs.
in the other cases examined by the gazette, the culprit reopening the city’s fresh roadwork is the city.
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early into its first term, the plante administration announced a new way of redoing streets that would make montreal more efficient with the public’s money and reduce the number of times the city disrupts the lives of residents. from now on, it said in 2018, the city would systematically integrate paving, bike path development and even traffic calming and tree planting with the replacement of water and sewer infrastructure and lead pipes.
in its first term, the administration produced integrated projects, gesuale said. but it has deviated from systematically rebuilding roads from a to z in its second term, she said.
“the hallmarks are patch jobs,” gesuale said.
indeed, recent civil service reports that present new roadwork contracts to city council employ jargon like “light” and “evolving.”
in city departments, the terms are code for “temporary,” gesuale said.
temporary is an excuse for doing surface improvements, and leaving underground infrastructure for another time, she said.
“when you redo a street, do it from a to z,” gesuale said.
“if the bike path is urgent, fine. but if it’s urgent, we can also move quickly to do the water and sewer infrastructure. we can quickly replace the lead entry lines. one doesn’t prevent the other.”
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however, transitory intervention has its proponents.
jean-françois rheault, ceo of vélo québec, said he would prefer several “light” projects that are finished rapidly to make streets safe rather than big projects that take more time, are “more complex, and there are more delays and more costs.”
“there will always be bigger projects, like when we need to redo the pipes,” he said.
“but i would like to have more (and) lighter projects that take a few weeks and have a big impact on road safety.”
montreal has a propensity to favour “very big” projects, rheault said.
still, the issue of which candidate can best manage roadwork in the next mandate might be moot.
rheault and other sources told the gazette the city has run out of money and is currently axing and postponing projects that were in the pipeline.
montrealers may get their wish to see fewer orange cones, then. but it will be for the wrong reasons. and with the city’s infrastructure needs so great, it’s a daunting prospect for the next administration.
a cyclist heads east on de verdun st.’s bike path, which the city unveiled in 2024. this summer, the path was closed for water infrastructure work.
allen mcinnis
/
montreal gazette
case no. 1: the city built a bike path on de verdun st. then dug holes in it
location:
de verdun st., verdun borough
the issue:
verdun borough built a 2.8-kilometre protected bike path on de verdun st., between godin st. and henri-duhamel blvd., from 2023 to 2024, replacing painted bike path lines. cost: $9.6 million. this summer, the city returned and dug holes to rehabilitate an underground water main, replace lead entry pipes and do paving of a 425-metre section between 1st ave. and desmarchais blvd. part of the new bike path was closed during the work. dozens of lead service lines still need to be replaced, so the city will be back again some day.
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the city’s explanation:
the city concedes the sequence of work “is not ideal,” but says the “water main rehabilitation and lead service line replacement work were not included in the 2023 contract in order to limit costs, as they were to be carried out by specialized contractors.” to avoid conflicts with other projects in surrounding streets, it was put off until 2025. as for building the bike path when it hadn’t yet repaired what’s underneath, the city says it “took advantage of an opportunity in 2023” to make the street safer for cyclists. montreal’s “vision zero” policy aims to have zero deaths and serious injuries on the bike network by 2040.
what the critics say:
the city did things in the wrong order, the union representing the city’s engineers says. the union rejects the city’s excuse that it wanted to avoid conflicts with neighbouring projects, saying that with proper planning the city can co-ordinate different interventions to avoid coming back multiple times.
the details:
the $9.6-million contract, including taxes and contingencies, to build the bike path was awarded to environnement routier nrj, the sole bidder. the firm’s price was 59 per cent higher than the borough’s internal estimate.
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the aqueduct repair, lead pipe replacements and surface repaving between 1st and desmarchais in 2025 was awarded to sanexen services environnementaux inc. under a $9.89-million contract that covered work in three boroughs.
the city minimized duplication, such as by not paving the bike path between 1st and desmarchais during its construction in anticipation of the aqueduct work, city spokesperson hugo bourgoin said. “permanent” bike infrastructure, such as raised intersections and crosswalks, built in 2023 was not affected by the 2025 work, he added.
the city claims the cost of undoing and redoing work on the bike path in 2025 was $5,000. of the 28 lead service lines replaced in 2025, “only about 10 interacted with the bike lane improvements,” bourgoin said.
however, the union says it doubts the city’s low figure, noting that concrete barriers built in 2023 to separate the bike path from cars were also broken during the 2025 work. on top of materials, it says, there are costs for traffic maintenance, insurance and other fees in a construction contract.
the upshot:
three years of on-again, off-again construction work on de verdun. and more lead entry lines to replace in the future.
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