Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault says a tunnel also dedicated to cars would have cost between $9.5 and $10 billion and reiterates that the decision to abandon the motorway portion was only taken recently, months after the campaign electoral.
“It was a very, very difficult decision,” she said at a press conference on Thursday. “Politically, it’s difficult for my fifteen colleagues and me. That’s why there’s nothing triumphalist about what I’m telling you here. »
Ms. Guilbault had been dispatched solo to defend the new version of the project in the small room Évelyn-Dumas of the Parliament. A sobriety that contrasted with the large-scale press conferences orchestrated in the past on the popular original project.
According to him, the project would have cost between $9.5 and $10 billion if the government had not stepped on the brakes. Ms. Guilbault, however, refused to estimate the costs of a link dedicated solely to public transit.
While the opposition suspects the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) of having misled people during the election campaign, Ms. Guilbault claims to have obtained only at the end of March the “updated data” which convinced her to drop the project.
3400 people in the morning in 2036
“During the campaign, we always had the same answer: we are waiting for data updates, especially travel times,” she said. The minister argues that the department had promised her data after the holiday break, but that the latter were not to “her satisfaction”.
These data indicate that rush hour travel times between the two shores “have all decreased” between 2019 and 2022. “We have to take this into account,” she says. The number of cars fell from 55,300 to 46,500 on the Pierre-Laporte bridge, according to data from the Ministry of Transport.
For example, in 2022, it took an average of 9 minutes less in the morning to get from the Lévis Convention Center to the one in Quebec City in the morning (30 minutes instead of 39) compared to 2019. In the evening, the trip takes 4 minutes less (from 28 to 24).
The Minister also maintains that a highway tunnel would have been “cannibalized” by the tunnel dedicated to public transit because of the modal transfer of motorists to active transportation.
As for the new project, she argues that it would allow a modal transfer “varying from 5 to 10%” in 2036. It is estimated that 3,400 people would then use the tunnel during the morning rush hour, according to ministry models.
More details will follow.