A year into the massive undertaking the consortium building the new Turcot Interchange says roughly 30 per cent of the job is done and—so far—it is slated to be done on time and on budget.
It’s certainly not been easy thus far, according to a project director.
"The main challenge is to take into consideration the existing structures so the whole entire mobility plan, and the way we move people in the interchange is built around the existing structures," said KPH deputy project director Sebastien Marcoux during a press tour of the project site.
Marcoux revealed the models they used for traffic prediction expected worse congestion than what we have seen since the project began, but it could be a combinations of factors possibly including increased use of public transit by West Island commuters, he said.
The next disturbance in the flow-of-traffic force is coming, however, and before the end of the month.
Late in November, the eastbound side of the old Autoroute 720 will be closed and the new Route 136 running parallel to the south will open, but only at a reduced two lanes until the old structure is demolished, according to timetable plans from KPH Turcot.
“There is a whole sequence that is well defined, that is how we demolish the existing 720,” Marcoux explained. “It’s by phases; we need to close some traffic going in[to downtown] in the next few weeks, because traffic is going to be so close to what we are going to be demolishing.”
“From a safety standpoint, we can’t have traffic here and then demolish a few feet from here,” he continued.
Starting from when incoming traffic to downtown is diverted from Autoroute 20 and the Décarie Expressway to the new R-136 later this month—the exact date of which won’t be known until about a week prior, because of pending work to finish—it will take 12 to 18 months to gut the old 720 structure and haul away the concrete, Marcoux told reporters from the new ramp connecting southbound traffic from the Décarie to the new highway.
Once the demolition is done, R-136 can be expanded to four full-time lanes in each direction, plus a fifth to go with the flow of rush hour traffic, Marcoux continued.