Over 1,000 km of roadway need maintenance in Montreal: report

Montreal’s long-running construction gridlock isn’t improving, and in several key areas, it’s getting worse, according to a new report published Thursday.

The study, titled “Maximum Blockage,” is an update of an initial study on construction site management carried out in January 2023. The report was co-presented by The Montreal Chamber of Commerce and Tourisme Montréal.

The report’s inaugural issue was titled “Minimum Blockage” at its inception. But with this year’s results, officials say the 2025 edition warranted being described with the higher superlative.

The report paints a picture of a downtown still overwhelmed by simultaneous roadwork, failing infrastructure and a city administration that, according to the study’s authors, still lacks the basic tools to track and coordinate its own construction sites.

This year across the island, 31 per cent of the city’s roadways were considered in “poor” or “very poor” condition, a figure that climbs to 41 per cent in Ville-Marie, the heart of downtown.

Roughly 1,260 km of roadway require maintenance or full reconstruction, the equivalent distance between Montreal and Chicago, the report says.

While the number of obstructed arteries in the city’s hypercentre technically dropped by nearly 40 per cent from last year, the study warns this decline reflects a slowdown in construction starts, rather than a sign of speedy road fixes. The structural problems, it says, remain untouched.

And even with the slowdown, one-in-four downtown arteries this year were partially or completely blocked. In total, that represents about 18.7 km of roadway, up from 10.7 km in 2024.

‘The capital of orange cones’

The amount of orange cones laid on city streets, what the study’s authors referred to as “the unintended symbol” of Montreal, has risen since 2024.

In a single downtown quadrilateral — Sherbrooke Street to René-Lévesque Boulevard, Guy Street to Drummond Street — researchers counted 343 orange cones, more than 100 above last year’s total of 232.

“No one is spared: pedestrians, cyclists, motorists — everyone’s travel plans are disrupted,” Chamber of Commerce president Isabelle Dessureault and Tourisme Montréal president and CEO Yves Lalumière said in an open letter penned Thursday.

The authors also say even basic monitoring has become impossible. While the study previously tracked the annual proportion of obstructed arteries in Montreal’s hypercentre — 94 per cent in 2022, 93 per cent in 2023, 87 per cent in 2024 — this year, they were unable to perform the analysis at all.

The city’s data, they say, was delivered in such a disorganized format that it was “unusable.”

The report also points to what it calls a culture of “laissez-faire,” that allows traffic lanes to be obstructed even for trivial tasks during rush hour.

Excessive and unmodulated signage and traffic control elements, the study says, further contribute to the perception of a downtown “paralyzed by construction.”

“Montreal deserves better than to be caricatured as the capital of orange cones,” the letter reads.

The report points to what it calls Montreal’s technological mastery in AI and engineering as the way forward to overcome the city’s construction hurdles.

“Researchers already master these cutting-edge tools and deploy them elsewhere in the world,” the open letter reads. “It is now up to us to showcase this local expertise and fully integrate it into more modern construction site management.

“The real issue is no longer understanding, but taking action.”

At a Thursday morning press conference, Lalumière and Dessureault also called on the city to create a “construction site crisis unit” within Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada’s first 100 days in office to oversee the city’s construction planning.

“Enough is enough,” Dessureault said. “The way to plan needs to change.”