The various waves of transportation have left their mark on Montreal. The most recent, that of the streetcars, left unmistakable traces: wide streets such as Ontario, Sainte-Catherine, Saint-Antoine, Frontenac, Papineau, and Saint-Denis were originally built to accommodate streetcars. You can still occasionally see the tracks, buried under asphalt in the late 1950s. Since then, these streets have been increasingly taken over by cars. However, the gradual adoption of the costly automobile allowed the city time to adjust to this new mode of transport: adding highways, interchanges, bridges, parking lots, widening streets, and expanding into the suburbs. As a result, the city could no longer accommodate all its inhabitants, given the vast space demands of automobile transportation. Our cities had to be partially demolished to make room for cars, as described in the article “The Metamorphosis of Cities.”
Indeed, never before had cities witnessed such a space-consuming mode of transport: while a streetcar lane can carry 4,000 to 8,000 people per hour, a car lane transports only 600 to 1,600 people per hour. The proposed solution was to widen the roads, destroying even more green spaces and housing to build freeways. This text aims to depict the dystopian future tied to the continuation of this current trajectory.
Road building is an ongoing process. In recent years, the number of cars on Quebec's roads has continued to rise.1 As a result, city centers are forced to make space for the influx of vehicles coming in to access services. This perpetuates the cycle of reshaping urban space to accommodate the automobile. This is happening in a context where the majority of the population is increasingly concentrated in urban centers, as jobs are often located there.2 However, the population growth in city centers is never as rapid as that in the outskirts,3 leading to urban sprawl, increased travel between the suburbs and the city center, and greater reliance on commuting.
Eventually, people will need to be brought closer to work and essential services. In the meantime, let’s examine what can be done under the current circumstances.
If we view road construction or widening as a way to accelerate the flow of traffic, it becomes a simple plumbing issue—widening the pipe increases the flow. However, traffic is a dynamic system that expands based on the capacity of the road itself. As a result, there are at least four factors that lead to roads becoming congested with cars, often within a few years, ultimately reducing overall speed.
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If the new road proves faster, it will attract users from surrounding routes. Over time, traffic will balance out between these roads, and overall speeds will revert to the norm for arterial roads in the area.
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The improved access to a particular area also encourages new residential developments, which further increases traffic to match regional averages.
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Typically, homes in outlying suburbs are bought by young families who cannot afford to live downtown early in their careers. As their economic situation improves, many will likely purchase additional cars, often for their children, who have few transportation options aside from an occasional bus.
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Moreover, even when wider roads temporarily manage the surge in traffic, they simply shift the congestion to the next bottleneck: a bridge, interchange, railroad crossing, or even the nearby town center where most people work.
In other words, the construction of road infrastructure leads to increased demand for automobiles. According to many urban planners, this rise in demand is strong enough to neutralize any gains in road efficiency within just a few years.
This growth in the number of vehicles on the roads presents a serious issue, as it exponentially increases travel times. As the road network nears full capacity, vehicle speed decreases. One reason for this is that traffic flow on any part of a road is limited by the speed of the next bottleneck, such as the entrance to a bridge or a traffic light at the exit of a bridge or freeway. When these choke points become congested, cars queue up for longer and longer distances, causing delays that cascade down to motorists further back. Additionally, the more crowded the road, the more drivers must slow down to check their surroundings before making a maneuver or simply to maintain a safe distance from other vehicles. As a road approaches maximum capacity, vehicle flow slows to a crawl, making rush hour traffic nearly unmanageable.
In contrast, in the worst-case scenario, public transit like buses or trains only slows down passengers, who may have to wait for the next departure, but it does not slow down the system as a whole. For buses, while increased ridership may slightly extend loading times, it has minimal impact on overall speed—provided they aren't hindered by car traffic. High-ridership bus routes are often supplemented by express buses, which make fewer stops. Similarly, metro systems maintain fixed loading and unloading times, even when cars are full. Travel speed remains unaffected by how crowded the cars are. Therefore, while heavier traffic on highways significantly reduces car speeds, increased public transit ridership has little impact on travel times.
This has been empirically demonstrated in so-called Montreal. In so-called Quebec, highway infrastructure was primarily built between 1960 and 1975. On the scale of so-called Montreal, this led to the construction of four new bridges and five new highways. Statistics on average speed, measured in kilometers per hour outside of peak periods (morning and evening), provide empirical evidence of what happened starting in 1959, the year the so-called Montreal tramway was closed.4
Year Downtown City of so-called Montreal Island of so-called Montreal
1959 26.4 39 43.5
1963 29.7 40.8 44.8
1967 24.8 36.8 40
1969 23.2 36 40
1970 22 34.4 37.4
1973 21.6 33.6 36
1977 20.8 32 33.6
1979 20.8 30.4 31.2
Despite the greatest investments in road infrastructure in so-called Quebec, automobile traffic on the island of so-called Montreal has only slowed. In other words, even during the period of the most significant highway expansion, we were never able to build roads fast enough to make car travel a viable solution for improving transport speed. This demonstrates that building more roads and widening existing ones offers no real advantage. According to many urban planners, people don't choose their means of transport based on preference; they choose the fastest option—whether it's active, public transport, or cars. This shows that the only way to reduce the number of cars on the road is by improving the reach and capacity of non-automobile transport networks. As a result, the real speed of car travel would only increase in relation to the speed of alternative transportation modes, not through the expansion of road infrastructure.
This suggests that the best way to alleviate congestion is not by building more roads, but by investing in active and collective transport infrastructure. These modes of transport offer numerous benefits: reduced greenhouse gas emissions, less ecosystem and noise pollution, more efficient use of space, fewer accidents, increased transport accessibility, and reduced social inequalities.
Notes
1. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2069993/augmentation-vehicules-rout...
2. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2015004-fra.htm
3. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220209/dq220209b-fra.htm,
4. From Dagenais, 1982, Ironie du char.