It’s official: The planet has returned to its pre-pandemic mobility habits. In other words, traffic congestion is worse than ever everywhere in the world. That includes the greater Montreal area. So much so, in fact, that the average speed in the heart of the metropolis is currently the same as it was in the days of horse-drawn transport.
In downtown Montreal, the average speed in 2023 was 20 km/h, according to the most recent edition of an annual report on the state of road traffic around the world produced by the company Inrix. Inrix is a leading provider of real-time road data. The kind of data that is used by navigation applications like Google Maps, on mobile, and like the one that is installed by default in the dashboard of many cars sold here. GM, Ford, Volvo and others use this data to guide you to your destination as quickly as possible.
And by “fast” we mean “at least as fast as when people traveled on horseback”, since 20 km/h was also the average travel speed 20 years ago. At that time, urban mobility experts pointed out that this was also the speed reached by people traveling on horseback, in another era.
Twenty years ago, there was a promise to solve this problem by synchronizing traffic lights all around downtown Montreal. In the morning, they would speed up the arrival of workers at the office towers. In the evening, they would help them escape the city center.
This project was not carried out at the time. It was relaunched about ten years ago. We are still waiting for it. These days, during rush hour, police officers have replaced the traffic lights on several arteries in the greater Montreal area. They are not synchronized with each other.
In fact, the most cunning officers stop traffic when the line overflows into the previous intersection. This allows them to issue tickets to drivers who are only trying to follow the sometimes contradictory instructions received at the same time from two different officers.
Maybe we just misunderstood what the 2004 elected officials meant when they talked about “intelligent traffic lights”…
The perverse effect of teleworking
During the pandemic, it was thought that telework would permanently reduce traffic congestion, by avoiding travel for a portion of employees — office workers, those who juggle intangible information that they can easily manipulate, no matter where they are.
But it seems that this is not the case. Because even teleworkers have to travel during the day. They do it at other times, or adopt a hybrid schedule half-office, half-home. The result is that rush hour stretches out.
Rather than a rush from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., then from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., we now see congestion until 10 a.m., or from 3 p.m. onwards. Inrix data indicates that in the United States, there are now nearly as many trips taking place at noon in major urban centers as there are from 5 p.m. onwards.
The greater Montreal area has grown
The good news, if there is any, is that the average speed around Montreal is 60 km/h when it is not rush hour. You will have understood that this includes the speed on the highway, which increases the average. It drops to 37 km/h during rush hour, including on the highway.
This is a speed that is easily achievable by bike, cycling enthusiasts will tell you, an argument in favor of more active transport.
Also, and this is the worst news: the extent of traffic congestion around Montreal has reached unprecedented levels in 2023. The greater Montreal area has grown, so to speak. In all directions: traffic jams spilled over beyond Beloeil on the South Shore last year, while in 2022, they stopped 15 minutes earlier, near Sainte-Julie.
To the north, traffic jams extend further than Blainville, rather than being limited to Sainte-Thérèse. L’Assomption instead of Repentigny to the east, and well beyond the Île-aux-Tourtes bridge to the west.
Note that this is only data compiled daily and then expressed by Inrix on an annual basis. Congestion is heavier on some days and calmer on others. But, generally speaking, it always spreads a little more, each year. This was true before the semi-closure of the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine bridge-tunnel and the Île-aux-Tourtes bridge. It is even more so now.
We don’t know what it will be like when the bridges and tunnels are repaired, but this sends a clear signal to public transit companies in the greater Montreal area: the regions you serve and the fare zones you have drawn are too fragmented and too narrow to take into account all these mobility needs.
Demand today extends over a much larger territory than it did five years ago. It is also higher throughout the day, not just in the morning and evening.
And clearly, Google Maps is not going to get us out of this mess.