Montreal Plugged Over 111,000 Potholes This Spring — Now The City Looks Less Like The Moon
Believe it or not, the situation is getting better.
A pothole on a Montreal street in 2018.
Montreal is emerging from a successful battle with perhaps its greatest scourge: the pothole. The city is trumpeting a pothole-filling season that saw workers plug a whopping 111,000 cracks, gaps and pits on major thoroughfares — not counting work to fill holes on smaller local streets.
The operation cost $2.5 million this year. That's on top of the $880.6 million the city has earmarked for special road resurfacing efforts meant to better prevent potholes from emerging in the first place.
That 111,000 figure is up from the 96,800 reported and filled potholes in 2022, but still down, the city assures, from the 2017-2019 average of 176,461.
Montreal, and Quebec in general, is known for its pothole problem, in part the result, École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) professor Alan Carter explained in a CAAQ Q&A, of the "freeze-thaw cycles" that define late winter and early spring in the province.
There's no word on whether the city of Montreal resolved the pothole problems on the CAAQ's public-voted "worst roads" in the city in 2022: rue Notre-Dame E., avenue Christophe-Colomb, rue Sherbrooke E., boulevard de l'Acadie and avenue Papineau.
Those weren't even the worst in the province. That dishonour went to boulevard de la Gappe in Gatineau. Saint-Isidore's route du Vieux-Moulin, Saint-Jérôme's boulevard du Curé-Labelle, Gatineau's chemin Cook and Route 105, Sainte-Brigitte-de-Laval's avenue Sainte-Brigitte, Saint-Agapit's avenue Gourdeau, Quebec City's avenue Saint-Sacrement and chemin Sainte-Foy, and Lévis' avenue Taniata completed the 2022 top (or bottom) 10.
CAAQ's 2023 list of the worst roads in the province is forthcoming.
