Autoroute 30 fails to fulfil promises
Autoroute 30 was extended ten years ago with great hopes it would relieve traffic congestion on the island of Montreal. It hasn’t worked.
Autoroute 30 was extended ten years ago with great hopes it would relieve traffic congestion on the island of Montreal. It hasn’t worked.
Tim S. 10:40 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
The other day I noticed a truck full of logs on the Decarie at 5:15PM on a workday. Wherever those logs were going to or from, it wasn’t downtown Montreal.
Ephraim 11:13 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
If you want to make people take the 30 then incentivise it…. but instead it’s disincentivised by having a pay toll for the bridge and it only works if you are on the 20, not the 40. We need to start charging trucks that go into *and* out of the city, specifically going through the island rather than around. (And standardizing the transponder would be nice. I mean, both bridges that are pay use different transponders, which is different than the Ontario transponder for pay routes and still different from the American transponder)
Does anyone know how many trucks to 40 to 640 to 15 to 50 to get to Gatineau/Ottawa? Or is that just too many highway changes? It’s about 10km shorter.
Blork 12:04 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
It’s also disincentivized by not being obvious. AFAIK there are no signs that indicate GO THIS WAY TO AVOID CONGESTION or TAKE 30 TO BYPASS MONTREAL. No, you pretty much need a priori knowledge that the convoluted turns and exits for highway 30 that you come upon as you approach Montreal from the west is a bypass. Coming from the east, it’s less convoluted (at first) but the only indications I know of say simply “30 OUEST Vaudreuil-Dorion” which means nothing to anyone not from here. Nothing to indicate that it’s a bypass of the island or that it re-connects with the Trans-Canada at the other end.
You could argue that career truckers would have done their research, and that’s a good argument. But not all truckers are career truckers and this could be a new or rarely used route for many of them. The easiest thing for them is to get on the Trans-Canada and stay on it until they get to their destination. They might have heard that highway 30 bypasses the island, but there’s a fee and if you GPS it, you see that it adds distance. So unless you’ve been stuck in that parking lot AKA “the 40” a few times, you probably wouldn’t think to use the 30. (Pay more to go farther? No!)
But this is typical of road signage in Quebec, which is notorious for its lack of visibility and useful information.
DeWolf 12:26 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
I wonder if dynamic pricing could work in these situations. Put a toll on every single bridge and have it vary depending on congestion and the time of day.
steph 12:29 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
I figure at this point 50% of drivers blindly using GPS/googleMaps. Professionals 100% use these systems all the time. Time and milage are the ruling incentives. They all calculate using traffic patterns. If “going through the city” is shorter and cheaper, that’s the route they take.
My beef with the 30 is how stretches of it have no lighting, and night visibility is imortant to me. I’ll take the extra miles and minutes for a properly lit road.
Faiz 13:27 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
I live in Brossard and go to Toronto regularly. I also have an Ev and get a free pass for the toll.
I always check to see if A30 is faster. And if there is any congestion in the city I take A30. But if it’s smooth Decarie and the 40 tend to be faster.
My parents take it even if you have to pay $3 because it’s straightforward and reliable.
My company also does plenty of deliveries from Boucherville to points west. Anywhere from vaudreuil to dozens of places in Ontario. Absolutely none of our trucks use the 30. They all use Champlain > Decarie >40.
It’s just not built into our contracts, but maybe that might change.
Ephraim 13:36 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
They could also change the designations. Make the 30 part of the TransCanada at that point, renumber it to 20/30 (as we have the 10/15 already). Renumber the 20 from St-Bruno junction to the 40 as the 420 (620, 820 or 920 also available) and therefore normalise the 20/30 as the route around Montreal. Add signs that say Ottawa/Toronto/Kingston (and the pre-requisite sign to Sorel, because for some unknown reason all roads in Quebec lead to Sorel) and mark the new 420 as “Montreal/Laval” with no hint that you could go through the city in that direction.
Incidentally, Quebec HOPES that A35 will be finished by the end of 2023… if finished, it will be celebrating it’s 57th year of construction
On the other side of things, they should look into merging the A50 with the 148 over to the 303 and then to the 17/417 and designate that also as TransCanada so you can bypass Ottawa to North Bay/Sudbury. You might even be able to get the Federal government to kick in to make the A50 to the 148 without going into town and create a route west that completely skips most of Montreal (just goes through Laval) and Toronto entirely without having to go as far north as Tremblant and the Reserve, which of course isn’t well serve by electric charging.
Spi 14:16 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
All the people that are saying “just avoid the island”, have any of you looked at a map of the road network in say the last 40 years? In the infinite wisdom of the MTQ planners, all the crossings of the fleuve saint-laurent require going on to the island of montreal. There are entire administrative and economic regions (Laurentides and Lanaudiere) that can’t be accessed from the trans canada highway but by passing through the island, unless you think a 200-300km detour through trois-rivière is a viable alternative.
A lot of freight shipping business also relies on coshipping, meaning that you fill your truck as much as possible going one direction even if it requires multiples stops along the way. So a truck could have 90% of it’s cargo destined for locations off the island/else where in the province or country but because of that 1 stop he has to make on the island or on the other side of the river the driver has no choice.
Until a viable alternative to crossing the river is constructed east of the island (somewhere in the Repentigny/verchere area), it won’t get significantly better.
Ephraim 15:50 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
@Spi – It’s actually faster to go 20 to 30 to 20 than it is to go via the 20 alone because of traffic on the island. There is also the stupid section in Dorion where a national highway because a damn street. (Why did they not take the land next to the railroad and build the highway there, no one likely knows). The thing is the 20 t0 30 to 20 is about 10 km longer and has a toll $1.50 per axle for cars and $2.25 per axle for trucks. But it’s shorter, time wise, because you don’t have to deal with the traffic in the city. But it’s also not clearly marked or suggested or as we have said incentivised. (Class 6 and 7 trucks are $80 per axle… think Coca-Cola delivery truck, extremely heavy, but also school buses and some delivery trucks.)
Spi 16:42 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
@Ephraim, sure but people are talking about avoiding the island as if everything north of the saint-laurent doesn’t exist. We’re just going to pretend the million + people that live in Laval, Laurentides and Lanaudiere don’t exist? There are journeys that can avoid the island and many that can’t because some geniuses decided to concentre all the river crossings on it.
Ephraim 19:07 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
@Spi – Yes 🙂 If you have to take a bridge or a tunnel to get there, from here, it’s not Montreal 🙂
Kate 19:53 on 2022-12-12 Permalink
It’s not so much geniuses, Spi. There was simply more motivation to build bridges across from Montreal island because that’s where most of the population lived for a very long time. Putting a bridge across from Repentigny would be very expensive.
steph 09:31 on 2022-12-13 Permalink
> bridge across from Repentigny would be very expensive
more expensive than the two bridges they had to build at Beauharnois? (one over the river, the other over the canal/power station.) The west was already served with a link over the river (201 & 132). As mentioned, the next crossing eastwards is Trois-Riviere, and that’s quite a detour.
Kate 13:08 on 2022-12-13 Permalink
Yes, more expensive – it would have to span a wider section of water, yet be high enough to allow oceangoing ships into the working port.
bumper carz 13:34 on 2022-12-13 Permalink
It was built only 10 years ago, and yet none of its bridges have any pedestrian or cycling infrastructure.
This is what happens when the Ministère des Transports is staffed by used-car salesmen.