JOSHUA ALLAN
The 1019 Report
A grassroots group calling on Transport Quebec to build a high-speed bypass route for Highway 20 in Vaudreuil-Dorion that would allow through traffic to avoid having to navigate a series of traffic lights is making solid progress, as thousands have signed its petition supporting the initiative.
“In the stores on Harwood Blvd. there’s been a lot of people signing,” said Céline Pilon, a member of the Alliance of Citizens for a Real Highway 20.
The group launched the petition at the end of May, with Pilon saying it was finally time to give Transport Quebec “a little kick in the derrière” to get going on this long-promised project.
The petition has been collecting signatures at various locations across Vaudreuil-Soulanges and on the National Assembly’s website. As of yesterday, 3,351 people had signed the online petition, while an additional 3,154 signatures have been collected on paper versions of the petition, said Pierre Z. Séguin, one of the organizing members of the Alliance.
The group is calling on the provincial government to immediately start building the long-promised high-speed bypass route along a right-of-way north of the existing lanes of Harwood Blvd., allowing vehicles travelling to and from Vaudreuil-Dorion to Île Perrot to avoid the lights on Harwood. The lights along the Highway 20 lanes in Île Perrot would also need to be eliminated in a second phase of construction.
About 87,000 vehicles travel the route daily, causing headaches for commuters and local businesses located along the strip. It is the only stretch of a major highway in Canada that still has traffic lights.
Earlier this month, Transport Quebec announced it would begin studying the possibility of building the bypass. The group behind the petition greeted the move with enthusiasm, with Séguin saying he was was “very encouraged.”
But he tempered his optimism, by pointing out that the provincial government has been dragging its feet on this project, which locals have been urging for decades, with the first stretches of land having been expropriated about 60 years ago.
When the petition was launched, Pilon said the group is looking to collect a similar number of signatures as was collected in 2010 on a petition demanding a hospital for the region, which collected about 43,000 signatures.
The group plans to submit the petition to the National Assembly at the opening of the new session in September.
However, the petition itself will not end there, Séguin said.
“We’re going to continue after that,” he said: “We won’t stop at the end of September [. . .] nothing prevents us from going ahead with the petition and asking for more signatures.”
The deadline to sign the petition via the National Assembly’s website is Aug. 17. The physical petition will remain available to sign and can currently be found at numerous businesses located along Harwood Blvd., as well as at each of the IGA grocery stores in Vaudreuil-Dorion, Île Perrot, St. Lazare and Hudson.
To access the online petition, go to https://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/exprimez-votre-opinion/petition/Petition-10811/index.html