Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel | A direction will be closed for three years from next November

Three of the six lanes of the Louis-Hippolyte-Lafontaine tunnel will be closed from November 2022 to the end of 2025, the Ministère des Transports du Québec (MTQ) announced on Thursday. Traffic in both directions will therefore be concentrated on the three remaining lanes, two lanes towards Montreal and one towards the South Shore, considerably lengthening travel times.

Ariane Kroll
The Press

“We are not making this announcement lightly today, we wanted to be as transparent as possible,” said Transport Minister François Bonnardel at a press conference on Thursday.

“We are going to offer the best possible mitigation measures,” promised the Minister for Transport, Chantal Rouleau.

Major repairs to the tunnel began in July 2020, but the structure turned out to be much more deteriorated than expected, the MTQ said. The vault, for example, would have 60% more damage than anticipated.

“It’s the kind of degradation that you can only measure once the work has started, and that you can’t anticipate with precision,” explained Minister Bonnardel. He compared the tunnel to “an old house” in which major problems are discovered by opening the walls.

“With mitigation measures, reserves, miscellaneous costs, it is certain that we will have to pay a substantial amount of around 900 million. »

Quebec will absorb all of this cost overrun. With the design “80% complete”, the minister said he was confident to be “fairly accurate in our assessment”.

M^me Rouleau and he were informed of the situation on June 23, and the Council of Ministers was notified “on returning from vacation” on Wednesday, said the Minister of Transport.

“We had to give Quebecers the right time, not wait [même si] there was a [campagne électorale] who was coming. »

This larger-than-expected “volume of repairs” does not pose a safety risk, assured the MTQ in a technical presentation. “There is no issue for the safety of users, but we must intervene to, precisely, prevent there from being a progression of deterioration”, indicated an official.

Measures to be specified

The date of the start of the closure of half of the lanes, next November, remains to be specified.

Public transport companies in the region “will come to us quickly with a strong plan” to improve their offer, mentioned Minister Chantal Rouleau, referring to the free access of four bus lines from the moment the tunnel is reduced. three lanes, and an extension of the river shuttle service.

Bus lines 520, 521, 532 and 461, which serve park-and-ride lots in the Highway 20 corridor, will be free from the start of the major closure, and STM and RTL bus lines and exo will be improved, indicated the MTQ.

The river shuttle between Boucherville and Parc de la Promenade-Bellerive, with additional service on weekends, will also be maintained from March to November.

“Certain sections of reserved lane will be set up on the local network”, for his part indicated M^me Rouleau, who is also Minister responsible for the Metropolis and the Montreal region.

A scenario currently under study is the addition of reserved lanes to allow buses departing from the Montreal Radisson terminus to reach Autoroute 25 southbound more easily.

A “new tunnel”

“To put it simply: we are building a new tunnel in the existing tunnel,” summarized an MTQ official.

Instead of the repairs that were initially planned for the walls and the vault of the tunnel, these will have to be covered with extra thicknesses of concrete.

The tunnel is made up of two “tubes”, each containing three lanes in one direction. As this work must be done in a “closed tube”, each of the tubes will be closed in turn for approximately 18 months. Traffic in both directions will then be concentrated in the three remaining lanes, with two lanes towards Montreal and one towards the South Shore.

The three lanes towards the South Shore (south tube) will be closed from November 2022 until 2024, and then those towards Montreal (north tube) from 2024 until 2025.

The department’s objective is not only to reduce the impact on mobility, but also to limit the transit time. “We don’t want to be caught in a tunnel!” “, Illustrated a civil servant.

And since the constraints are greater at the exit located on the Montreal side, it is in this direction that two lanes have been kept-in order to avoid an excessively long line of vehicles at the entrance located on the Shore side- South.

The travel time between interchanges and tunnel entrances will be “three to six times” longer than before the pandemic, depending on the time of day and the direction taken, estimates the MTQ. Twelve panels will display, in real time, the duration of the journey to reach the tunnel.