This summer, the surge in car traffic at Montreal’s Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau International Airport in the wake of the pandemic sparked frustration, confusion and despair.
Car horns, groans and some rudeness could be heard at the airport entrance on Thursday as a herd of cars crept across the road toward the terminals.
For some worried travelers, the standoff was too much. More than a dozen of them got out of their cabs and, luggage in hand, sped hundreds of meters through traffic in desperate attempts to catch their flight – or just to avoid the wait. Their heads swung between the vehicles on the boulevard that branches off the highway, where there is no sidewalk.
The Société de transport de Montréal (STM) has been trying to find diversions for the airport shuttle. The operator of the site has now opened additional free parking spaces and increased staff for traffic control.
So far, however, there appears to have been no success in easing the bottlenecks that are angering motorists.
Uber driver Fadi Istanbul said he regularly took 30 minutes to travel the two kilometers from the highway exit to the passenger drop-off area during rush hour.
Stanley Bastien, who worked as a driver for several years and currently drives a limousine, said the recent traffic jam is the worst he has ever experienced at Montreal’s only international passenger airport, located about 20 kilometers west of downtown.
“I haven’t seen that in 27 years,” he said, noting that pedestrians on the highway exit have become a common sight. The traffic, he continued, “never stops and it feels like no one is doing anything.”
Mr Bastien claims that traffic flows have been deteriorating for about a year as air traffic has increased sharply following the crisis related to the pandemic.
In a statement, the company that manages Montreal-Trudeau Airport acknowledged the situation, citing a “significant increase” in travel since the start of the summer.
Passenger numbers are increasing
Aéroports de Montréal has not yet published its results for July and August, but recorded 5.3 million passengers at the airport between April and June, 6.1% more than in the same quarter of 2019 and an increase of 32.9% compared to 2022.
The company has taken several measures to ease traffic this year: deploying more traffic control officers in one area, opening a third free parking area, changing the route of the employee airport shuttle to bypass the passenger drop-off area and adding Uber service relocated pickup area.
Aéroports de Montréal also expects its new parking lot, currently under construction, to further ease pressure on pickup and drop-off areas. In the meantime, it encourages travelers and drivers to “plan your trips carefully and check road conditions and traffic flow before heading to the airport.”
Expectations of an increase in travel time failed to ease the frustration of Ben Borowiecki and Judith Durkin, British tourists who were among the travelers who abandoned their taxis on the highway on Thursday. They arrived early for their flight but were eager to get to the airport after a reported 30-minute wait at the exit ramp.
“We saw this was going to happen, so we planned (our schedule) accordingly,” Borowiecki said. But it meant we were able to spend less time in Montreal (than we had hoped). »
“It’s a little crazy,” Ms. Durkin noted. We usually try to take public transport to the airport, but that would take even longer. »
Unlike its Boeing namesake, the 747 bus route, which connects downtown Montreal to the airport, is subject to the same traffic problems as any other road vehicle traveling to Montreal-Trudeau.
In a press release, STM admitted that it too had been struggling with the “problematic” situation on the route to the airport in recent months. The agency, in collaboration with Aéroports de Montréal, has set up diversions for route 747 to allow buses to avoid the worst of the traffic jams.
However, private drivers and taxi drivers do not have this luxury. Mr Bastien said many of his links were now also regularly clogged.
Taxi driver Sahouane Radouane admitted he had no choice and no solution in sight, but considered finding another job. “It is a catastrophe,” he emphasized. We’re tired of working with it. »