Airport plans changes to access roads
Trudeau airport is starting a major project to reorganize its access roads and enlarge its parking.
Billions of dollars! Wasn’t the REM supposed to make airport access easier and negate the need for more access for vehicles?
walkerp 10:29 on 2025-06-18 Permalink
I don’t know about the cost but the REM isn’t done yet and I suspect it will significantly improve things and even with that, the access roads and parking also need to be improved.
Blork 10:47 on 2025-06-18 Permalink
Didn’t they just do all that? Wasn’t access a mess for several years up to about two years ago because they were re-doing all the access roads?
Although you wouldn’t know it. Even after that round of work I found that driving from the 20 to the terminal (and back out again) was like being dropped into some strange world where navigation was some kind of high-stakes immersive VR game with artificial rules and barriers all over the place.
DeWolf 10:56 on 2025-06-18 Permalink
It’s not just the roads. The airport is expanding the terminal, adding a new jetty and demolishing the existing garage opposite the main entrance. The current drop-off and pick-up area will be occupied by the new terminal expansion, so road access will be shifted about 100 metres away from where it currently is.
https://www.admtl.com/en-CA/corporate/about-us/future-projects
Nicholas 12:53 on 2025-06-18 Permalink
The previous access road project was mainly that direct connection to/from the 20. But the number of cars going onto the pickup/dropoff ramps is just too high for the number of lanes, which was designed decades ago for way fewer passengers, so you have constant backups. I would have hoped that the REM would cause enough people to skip driving in, but people think otherwise. But due to induced demand, them building more road capacity will, in fact, cause fewer people to take the REM, because driving will be easier.
And to be fair, the biggest transit use to the airport is always employees (second being business people going to downtown), and employees wouldn’t be driving to the terminal ramps, but to employee parking. Most people flying with bags just do not want to navigate transfers, especially when more than half the metro is inaccessible. (I take transit to the airport even when work has paid, and have even biked, so it’s not me.)
And DeWolf is right, it’s way more than the roads. I would guess car stuff is nine figures, but the expanded island jetty will be ten.
DeWolf 17:25 on 2025-06-19 Permalink
The construction will probably help the REM in the short term. Yesterday I dropped my in-laws off at the airport and it took an hour to get there because of traffic. (And nearly an hour to get back into town.) If the REM was operating, they would have been happy to take it to some in-town station where I could pick them up. Nobody likes sitting in traffic.