Frustration, despair at Montreal airport amid road traffic woes
Global News
A post-pandemic surge in car traffic at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport this summer has led to confusion and desperation for many travellers.
The entrance to Montreal’s airport rumbled with honks, groans and a few profanities on a recent afternoon as a herd of cars inched forward on the road leading to the terminals.
The gridlock proved too much for some anxious travellers to bear. More than a dozen ditched their rides, some dashed hundreds of metres alongside traffic, luggage in tow, in frantic attempts to catch their flights — or to simply skip the wait. Their heads bobbed between vehicles on the boulevard that branches off from the highway. There is no sidewalk.
Among them was Nick Galbraith, whose father deposited him on the side of the road, hundreds of metres from the airport. “It’s an embarrassment,” Galbraith said of the traffic on Thursday. “Obviously ridiculous.”
A post-pandemic surge in car traffic at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport this summer has led to frustration, confusion and desperation. The city’s public transit authority has scrambled to find detours for the airport shuttle, and the company that manages the site has opened more free parking and added traffic-control staff. So far, it appears nothing has worked to ease the bottlenecks.
Uber driver Fadi Istanboulie said it regularly takes him 30 minutes to travel the roughly two kilometres between the highway exit and passenger drop-off zone during peak traffic hours, which he says are between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. He issued a plea for airport officials to address the situation: “They need to find a solution.”
Stanley Bastien, who has worked as a chauffeur for 27 years and currently drives a limousine, said the recent road congestion is the worst he has ever experienced at Montreal’s only international passenger airport, located about 20 kilometres west of downtown.
“I’ve never seen this in the whole 27 years,” he said, noting that pedestrians on the highway exit ramp have become a daily sight. The traffic, he continued, “never stops and it feels like nobody is doing anything.”
Bastien claims the traffic flow has been deteriorating for about a year as air travel has risen sharply after the pandemic-related slump.
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