May 28th - Montreal road trip wrap up and observations

I have been to Montreal about 4 times I think.  Strangely, in the over 10 years Brian and I have been together, we'd never been to Montreal together despite it being a place Brian has been to several times also.  This was my first overnight trip there in over 10 years.  My memories from those trips from long ago were of the almost European atmosphere and the wonderful food and the charming Metro.  2 of my previous trips to Montreal were via train which changed a lot about how I saw and experienced Montreal.

We stayed in Laval which is just across a river from Montreal proper.  We drove from our home near Rochester NY.  We also only made 2 trips into Montreal proper, one on Metro, 1 by car.  Montreal has a very strong reputation amongst urbanists who envy their public transit and the ubiquity of bike infrastructure in the city.  I can see why those aspects of the city are revered.  

Unfortunately, like most places it seems like the balance between two things has been lost.  You want a city that encourages and enables transit and bicycling but you need a city to work for economic development and activity too.  To me, Montreal has gone fully to one extreme.  The state of the roads in the city (and the province overall) are pretty awful.  Literally the majority of the urban and suburban streets we drove on had such badly worn lane markings as to be basically invisible in any thing but dry bright daylight.  

The suburban and exurban Autoroutes are functional at allowing high (sometimes very high) speed travel but with no comfort or relaxation. The bridges in Quebec mostly have metal joints between the sections that stick up above the pavement. The day they were paved the joints and the pavement were probably well matched but at the moment almost all the roads seemed very worn down and badly surfaced but those steel joint plates don't wear at all.  So the bridges were at least 1 nasty bump at the start and 1 at the end.  Long bridges were a series of nasty bumps every 50 meters or whatever.  Whack, whack, whack, whack.

Still, those Autoroutes outside the city met the basic minimum needs for wide enough lanes, merging distances, good signage etc.  The urban street network in Montreal seemed truly dreadful.  Since there are cars parked on every possible inch of available street space, people double parked all over the place.  The manhole covers seemed to be dropped in at 15 degree angles in many places and so many of the intersections are 4 way stops even when there is a clear dominant road meeting a very sleepy side road.  Overall, the effect (and I suspect, design) is to keep vehicle speeds VERY VERY low.  This would be great if it had the effect of keeping vehicle traffic low but there were unending oceans of cars trying to jam into the city, especially near the undersized, under engineered intersections of city streets of Autoroute exits.  It's pretty sad that the most smoothly flowing urban road we were used was one with nose to tail parking on both sides of the street leaving only 1 narrow tunnel of a lane in the middle. At least here nobody COULD double park and there wasn't really anything for cars to do except to bounce their way down the narrow street. I think that street also had mostly signalized intersections which helped.

Then there is the biggest fail in my mind. The urban Autoroutes.  ugh.  The right of way for the A15 is quite narrow.  This leaves no room for collector-distributor ramps.  I had a really hard time finding a diagram or picture of a CD ramp that wasn't an enormous mini freeway of its own as often seen in Texas for example.  Basically a CD ramp would take 2 or 3 closely spaced intersections and have a single lane walled off from the through lanes of the highway and all the exits and merges from those interchanges would happen off to the side of the main road, reducing the impact of people slowing down for an exit, people trying to line cut in front of backed up exits and people kamikaze merging from those exits onto the main road. In short they take a lot of crazy bad behavior out of urban intersections.  Since they don't seem to have any of these, there were people stopping in the 2nd lane over to try to cut in front of people in line for backed up on-ramps, jams at every merge point and on and on.  Truly one of the most primitive big city freeway designs I've ever seen.

Laval presents some interesting contrasts to Montreal. Despite being just a modest river crossing away, Laval is a different world.  The roads were still bumpy and the traffic lights seemed designed to keep you from every going more than half a mile without stopping but the roads were also much wider as you would expect in a suburban city with some industrial areas.  There are still bike lanes basically everywhere and often there were physically separated from car traffic.  The Metro does (just barely) come into Laval which provides good linkage with the economic and cultural hub of Montreal.  There is a Bus Rapid Transit project being built in at least 1 section of Laval.  What can't be replaced is the visual appeal of Montreal. Laval is unending long corridors of strip malls and generic commercial architecture.  Still, if I had to live someplace in the Montreal area, Laval would be more tempting than the city itself by far.

Overall, we absolutely enjoyed our long weekend.  The food standard around Montreal is very high and especially with our amazing US Dollar exchange rate, quite reasonably priced.  The park areas and riverside trail networks full of families out enjoying the sun still have that almost European quality.  I do worry about their fiscal health as a city and region though. If you can't afford to keep your road network in passable shape right now when the economy has been strong for 10 years, what will it look like 3 years into a deep recession?

As soon as we crossed into New York it was so relaxing being able to cruise along NY-37 which is almost flawlessly paved from end to end.  I-81 is kept in good shape but it's hardly a showpiece of infrastructure quality but it seemed like a miracle after many hundreds of km of bumpy rutted Quebec Autoroutes and horrifying barely paved minor highways.  As always, travel is great at both showing you what you are missing and reminding you of what you have.