Invasion of the traffic cones: Montreal’s pandemic recovery is threatened by poor planning

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Montrealers have become so used to orange traffic cones blocking their streets that the construction pylon is half-jokingly referred to as the city’s unofficial symbol.

Last month, city workers even used asphalt to anchor a pylon outside the chic Ritz-Carlton hotel on Sherbrooke Street, to the incredulity of passersby and one downtown city councillor who posted a picture of the unsightly orange blob on Twitter.

A city spokesperson told CTV News that the cone was being used “as a temporary protection to cover the base of the streetlight already installed underground” and would “be removed when the lamp post is installed.” Asphalt was poured around the cone “to make the pavement safer.” What Einstein thought of that?

The often-baffling logic employed by the city’s public works department never ceases to amaze Montrealers. In this case, the only inconvenience they faced was the visual pollution this one cone created. Elsewhere, the proliferation of orange pylons on city streets has made navigating the downtown core an excessively hazardous and nerve-racking exercise for drivers and pedestrians alike. And it is hurting the city’s economy.

The seemingly interminable roadwork is seen as a major impediment to reviving Montreal’s downtown after the pandemic led to an exodus of office employees and a surge in remote work, leaving retail merchants and landlords struggling to survive.

Difficulty accessing and moving around within the downtown core is a major irritant discouraging workers from returning to the office, the Montreal Chamber of Commerce said in a report last month that called for better co-ordination between the city, the provincial transportation ministry and construction companies to fix the problem.

The report found that there are few if any rules governing the use of traffic pylons in Montreal. While many other cities track pylons with bar codes or radio frequency identification (RFID) and fine private contractors that fail to remove their cones after finishing a project, virtually anything goes in Montreal. The chamber of commerce study, produced with local urban-planning firm IdéesFX, found that more than a quarter of the cones in the downtown core served no apparent purpose or had been abandoned.

What’s more, fully 94 per cent of downtown streets, the study found, were totally or partially blocked at one point in the year to last March because of road maintenance, building construction or repairs to underground utility lines. Worse still, one-third of all streets in the core were totally or partially blocked at the same time last fall.

Unlike North American cities with central agencies that co-ordinate public and private construction projects to minimize congestion, nothing of the sort exists in Montreal. The chamber of commerce recommended in its report that the city “bring together all stakeholders under one smart entity responsible for planning and coordinating construction sites” and “expedite the modernization of the construction sector through the creation of a site dedicated to innovation and productivity improvement.”

The chamber of commerce looked into why construction projects and road repairs usually take much longer to complete in Montreal than in other cities in Canada or around the world. It found that the relatively small size of Quebec construction companies means they are less likely to use productivity-enhancing technologies such as building information modelling (BIM) software, which generates digital representations of projects to facilitate planning. Quebec has no construction company close in size to Edmonton-based PCL Construction or Mississauga-based EllisDon. The result, the report says, is that “few construction companies in Quebec have the necessary capabilities to execute large projects in a single phase.”

The downsides of the phased approach are clear in the makeover of Sainte-Catherine Street, downtown’s main shopping drag. The eight-phase project to replace century-old watermains, widen sidewalks and remove parking spaces was announced in 2014. In 2017, backhoes began digging up an eastern section of the street in the first of several excavations on the same site. It was temporarily paved over during the summer tourist season, only to be dug up again in the fall.

Six years later, only a third of the 2.2-kilometre Sainte-Catherine Street project has been completed, with no end in sight. “Whether by foot, bike or car, people travelling on Ste. Catherine Street from Shaughnessy Village [in the west] to the Quartier des Spectacles [in the east] will encounter major obstacles for a decade,” the report says, noting that Paris recently completed a much larger and more complex makeover of its Les Halles pedestrian mall in the city’s busy 1st Arrondissement in only 19 months.

Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante responded to the report by promising to hold a sommet des chantiers, or construction-site summit, this spring to address its concerns. For the sake of the city’s once-bustling downtown, that can’t come soon enough.