New Roads doesn’t mean less traffic
One of the two lanes of the Turcot interchange was closed to prepare for the new two lane road called Route 136 which is parallel to the Ville Marie Expressway. However, in order to build this new road, four of the lanes on the Ville Marie will be closed during the process of construction. During the construction process, many of the travelers looking to head north may have to avoid the Turcot area entirely. For the people using public transportation, the STM will be adding an extra train as well as extra buses. While this will allow more people to use public transportation, people should also prepare for being in traffic longer as well.
Theoretically, if we built a network model and applied game theory to it, new roads should allow consumers to maintain at least the same travel time if not reach a better overall travel time. However, as reality shows, during the process of building the new roads, current ones in use are closed to allow the new connections to be made thereby increasing traffic and travel time. Even the efforts to accommodate more people by increasing the availability of public transportation will only increase traffic. Although some people will switch to using public transportation, many people will continue to use their own transportation, thus the total amount of vehicles on the roads will not have decreased whereas the total number of roads available has. As such, it is inevitable that during construction, people will have no choice but to plan for extra travel time because traffic will only increase during this period.
http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/brace-for-gridlock-as-connection-between-20-east-and-ville-marie-goes-down-to-one-lane-1.3111780