Banning solo cars from the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine bridge-tunnel will not be enough. Its partial closure has not really begun yet, it is already a disaster. At the same time, it confirms the disavowal of all those voices heard at the height of the pandemic who promised that Quebec would learn the lessons of a crisis that we are ultimately just eager to forget.
Unlike the COVID crisis, the bridge replacement was well planned. We have known for years that we needed alternatives. Some have been erected in recent months. The Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal is right: they are insufficient.
Above all, we hoped for an opening in time of the REM, which is quite a bit further west, but which will serve as a rallying point for a good part of the buses from the South Shore. We now know that it will only work halfway and only from next spring.
In the process, entrepreneurs and municipalities in the southern crown, smelling good business, set up teleworking spaces before the pandemic, where employees from the suburbs could go without having to go to the office.
We now realize that more should have been done. Carpooling? Yes. And more. If we want to reduce the repercussions of this closure of the La Fontaine tunnel, we will have to return to practices that made it possible to get through the worst moments of the pandemic. Unfortunately, the reverse is happening.
Missed turn
At the height of the pandemic, politicians, employers, workers, consumers, people from all walks of life swore that post-COVID Quebec would be more flexible, more resilient, more sober in its mobility and in its consumption. We will be ready for the next crisis, we swore. It is enough to be at the foot of the Jacques-Cartier bridge in the afternoon at any time of the week to see the emptiness of these wishes and these promises. The Montreal network was already saturated a year ago. It won’t get better.
Sites – like the Blue Basket – promised to merchants for an easier digital shift and which must promote local purchases have emerged too modestly and too late. Quebec Internet users are buying massively on Amazon and even on the Chinese site AliExpress, which has led to an increased presence of their delivery trucks everywhere on the roads of the province.
Workers, who have discovered the existence of cloud computing tools paid for at a high price by their boss, are forced to return to the office. Bosses haven’t stopped paying for their cloud software, however, if Microsoft’s latest financial data is any indication. from a distance. The cameras and mics are studio quality. Collaboration software is more versatile than ever.
But the bosses are not inclined to give more ballast to their staff. The monthly data compiled by Statistics Canada show for at least three months an abandonment of telework which is accelerating. The return to pre-pandemic “normal” is well underway and suggests that we will have forgotten the lessons of the pandemic long before 2025.
Mobility, mobility…
In 2025 or, if all goes as planned, the year when we will have a brand new La Fontaine tunnel. Considering everything else, that’s another promise that it’s hard to imagine that it will be kept.
Without a reliable, affordable and accessible alternative, motorists are unlikely to abandon their car to go to work or play in the city. Paying to take the bus or the metro is still, in 2022, the most complex and retrograde transaction there is, on a par with the half and half sold in arenas during atom hockey games. We are surprised that the televisions in the stations are not in black and white.
For lack of another more attractive option, commuters continue to travel by car. It will soon be electric, and we will impose a new tax on the distance traveled, which they will prefer to pay rather than abandon this practice.
The infrastructures that would have made the situation more tolerable than it will be for the next three years are not there. From one temporary situation to another, we realize that one day we will have to provide permanent solutions. After the COVID crisis and the bridge-tunnel crisis, it might as well be an environmental crisis.
The Legault government promised during the election campaign that has just ended that it would open a dialogue with the municipalities of the region to make more room for active and public transportation. Already, we have built huge park-and-ride lots everywhere. Bus routes and reserved lanes have been created on major highways.
Lanes reserved for buses where solo motorists travel at all times of the day in their vans, this is not the most exact definition of public transport, even less of active transport.
But that’s what happens when we collectively struggle to learn the lessons of the past. Even if this past dates back barely six months…