When there is a bridge crisis at the western tip of the island, the town of Ste. Anne de Bellevue has learned how to react: You cut off all the so-called “shortcut routes.”
It’s the only way to avoid complete gridlock in the town’s village core. Then, you wait and hope that the growing number of people who travel to and from the West Island and Vaudreuil will stop trying to find some alternative route through the quaint little village as they desperately attempt to avoid lines of traffic on the highway and rejoin the queue closer to the bridge.
That is one of the coping mechanism Ste. Anne Mayor Paola Hawa has adopted in the last weeks since ongoing emergency repair work on the Île aux Tourtes Bridge has closed all but one lane in each direction on the span along Highway 40.
“There is almost no access to (Highway) 20 west from the village,” Hawa said, explaining that eliminating left turns for commuters heading north on St. Pierre Street from the village to access the autoroute to Île Perrot has deterred drivers heading west from leaving the highway at Morgan and attempting to make their way along the lakeshore in the hope of bypassing the congestion on Highway 20.
“We’ve shut down each and every way,” Hawa said.
That includes eliminating access to commuters who attempt to cut across the John Abbott and Macdonald College campus to access westbound Highway 40 as a means of avoiding the backlog of traffic on that expressway that often snakes back all the way to St. Charles Blvd. in Kirkland during rush hours.
“It’s not ideal,” Hawa admitted. “It’s making the most out of a really bad situation.”
It is also – slowly, as commuters figure out the restrictions put in place and – in some instances enforced by police, who are handing out fines – ensuring that local traffic flow through Ste. Anne is not constantly snarled like when the Île aux Tourtes was closed completely for a short while in May 2021.
Hawa is outraged that mayors and provincial elected officials on both sides of the Île aux Tourtes are not clamouring for the Quebec government to answer for not acting sooner to begin construction of a new bridge or put forward a design of a new span that would accommodate extending the REM light rail service to the off-island.
“When are we going to call for an investigation on how we got here,” she said. “Who dropped the ball?”
On Monday, Quebec Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault held a press conference in Senneville to announce that work on building a new span has begun and that its completion would be accelerated so that the new span would be put into service by the end of 2026, a target date that had already been put forward by Transport Quebec officials back in April.