MCTAVISH pumping station | Still eight years for the Montreal “Sagrada Família”

The Barcelonans received an incredible news last year. The Sagrada Família, their cathedral under construction for 143 years, will be completed in 2026.

The Gothic masterpiece can be appreciated in all its splendor, they were announced. The vision of the architect Antoni Gaudí will be materialized, once and for all. The cranes and scaffolding will finally be removed.

But no, in the end. Yet another deadline was set for the end of the work: 2033 … at the earliest!

I could not help thinking about our Catalan cousins by learning the latest news about the MCTAVISH pumping station, our local Sagrada Família.

The preparatory site was launched over 15 years ago for its complete repair. The end date has been repeatedly postponed, since the time when Gérald Tremblay was mayor of Montreal.

The new schedule is now known: 2033.

Eight years of work, eight years of closure of the avenue of Doctor-Penfield, and eight years of puzzle to circulate in this nerve sector, at the crossroads between downtown and Mont Royal.

And as we never really know what to expect with the Montreal aqueduct network, this date could still be postponed.

It’s long, eight years. It’s almost 3000 days, if you want to be discouraged a little more. An incomprehensible duration.

I have concocted a house list of some major Quebec works made in much less time.

First there is the essential Montreal metro. The preliminary project was presented in October 1961. The work began in May of the following year and the first 20 stations were inaugurated in October 1966.

Total duration, from A to Z: four and a half years.

While the metro entered service, the erection of the Pierre-Laporte bridge began, in Quebec. The project was ultra-ambitious: building the longest suspended work in the country, supported by two pylons equivalent to 35-storey buildings.

Everything was completed in four years and dust in 1970.

A few decades later, the Samuel-de Champlain bridge was also made at a lightning speed, between Montreal and the South Shore. The 3.4-kilometer book as well as a new bridge to Île-des-Sœurs and various motorway connections were completed in just 42 months.

Less than the average rental duration of a car …

And more recently, there has been the Metropolitan Express Network (REM). The Light Train site has experienced failures, but it was still achieved at a substantial rate. The initial antenna of 17 kilometers and 5 stations was inaugurated in 2023, 5 years after the first shovel of earth.

The game of comparisons is always approximate. Apples, oranges, etc. We get along: the MCTAVISH pumping station is neither the Sagrada Família nor the Montreal metro.

This work built between 1928 and 1947 is the nerveless point of the entire Montreal drinking water network. Its installations, nestled underground and inside a castle of neo-Renaissance style, are dilapidated and fragile. Its renovation will be of rare complexity.

Part of the pumps and the reservoir adjacent active during the work, to supply more than a million Montrealers with drinking water. It will be like performing an open heart operation while the patient is awake.

But the time required to launch – and complete – this project is hard to intellectualize, especially since the deadlines have fluctuated a lot. According to successive administrations – Tremblay, Coderre, Plante -, the projected end date increased from 2015 to 2020, then to 2028, and now to 2033…

There were aqueduct broken in the meantime. Urgent repairs to be made. And a pandemic, which has undoubtedly delayed the case a little. Never mind: the extent of the deadlines remains mind -blowing.

If the site takes place as planned, the average Montrealers will only see fire. The water supply will be provided throughout the work, thanks to the reopening of the Rosemont tank in 2021, which ensures robustness and redundancy to the network.

But motorists will undergo the backlash: traffic around the MCTAVISH station may be excruciating. The sector, straddling McGill University and the former Royal Victoria Hospital, has already been under perpetual site for years.

All the traffic that arrives from the west by the avenue du Docteur-Penfield will be redirected to the avenue des Pins, reduced to a single route per direction. We are talking about 800 vehicles per hour, during peak periods, which is significant.

And that’s not all.

It will soon be necessary to add thousands of additional vehicles to this. Because for those who have forgotten it, the administration of Valérie Plante decided to close the Camillien-Houde path to all traffic, on Mount Royal, from 2027.

Some 10,000 motorists use this path every day, to pass between the east and the west by the mountain. Part of them will fall back on the avenues of the pines and the Doctor-Penfield.

And that is without counting the citizens of the East who will want to go to the summit of Mount Royal by car, to ski or picnic: they too will have to find a new journey from 2027. By bypassing the West, especially by pines.

Road chaos alert.

In this context, we should seriously think of delaying the closure of Camillien-Houde, who is not urgent, whatever the administration in place said.