There is a stretch of road in Montreal that tells you everything you need to know about how Quebec manages public infrastructure. It is not complicated. It does not require a degree in urban planning or civil engineering to understand. You just have to drive it once. Highway 25 South toward the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine Tunnel. Any weekday. Any season. Any time between roughly 7 in the morning and 7 at night. You are on a highway rated for 100 kilometres per hour. You are moving at 20. On a good day, maybe 30. The car in front of you has not changed lanes in fifteen minutes. The GPS says you are eight minutes away from the tunnel. You have been eight minutes away from the tunnel for the past forty-five minutes. You begin to understand, slowly and without drama, that this road was not built for the city that exists around it. It was built for a version of Montreal that stopped existing decades ago — and nobody in a position of authority has done anything serious about it since.
The Tunnel That Became a Symbol of Everything Wrong Before repairs began, an average of 120,000 vehicles used the Lafontaine Tunnel daily. (CBC News) That number alone should tell you something. This is not a regional connector. This is a critical artery linking Montreal’s east end to the entire South Shore — touching Highways 20, 25, and Route 132 — and it has been operating as a construction site for the better part of this decade. When the project launched in 2020, the Quebec Transport Ministry said it would take four years. Then engineers discovered the tunnel was in worse shape than expected. The Transport Minister compared it to an old house: “You start opening the walls, and you’re facing major problems.” The total bill jumped from $1.2 billion to $2.1 billion, and a full year was added to the schedule. (CTV News) Then more years were added. The project was originally scheduled to be completed by November 2025. Then the Ministry announced the ventilation towers were more damaged than expected. Work was delayed again. (CBC News) The full opening of both tunnel tubes is now expected in late autumn 2026, with the road operating at only two lanes in each direction until spring 2027 to complete work on the approaches. Landscaping and completion work will continue throughout 2027. (Renewcanada) For a tunnel that was supposed to be done in 2024. On a budget that nearly doubled. In a province already running a nearly $10 billion annual deficit. This is not bad luck. This is the institutional signature of a government that consistently underestimates, underplans, and then asks everyone else to absorb the consequences while it keeps the revenue. . The Radar Camera Scam on an Unfinished Road Here is the part that should make every driver in Montreal genuinely angry. Photo radar is now installed on Highway 25 near the La Fontaine Tunnel in both directions. (CTVNews) The speed limit through the construction zone is set at 50 kilometres per hour. On a highway. One that is rated for 100 km/h when it is functioning normally. And the result? Two speed cameras at the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine bridge-tunnel on Highway 25 issued 40,499 tickets in 2025 alone. Combined, those cameras pulled in $13.57 million, with fines averaging around $335 each. (MTL Blog) Read that again. $13.57 million. From two cameras. On one stretch of unfinished highway. In a single year. The logic being sold to the public is worker safety. And in principle, nobody argues with protecting workers. But there is something deeply dishonest about placing a 50 km/h radar trap on a road where traffic is already moving at 20 km/h because the construction itself has created a permanent bottleneck. You are not slowing down dangerous speeders. You are ticketing desperate commuters the moment they find a brief gap in the gridlock and try to move at something resembling a normal speed. The government created the congestion. Then it monetized the frustration of everyone trying to navigate it. That is not road safety. That is a revenue stream with a hard hat on it.
Montreal Is Being Used as a Bridge There is a pattern that anyone who drives this corridor in summer has noticed and that nobody in government wants to acknowledge publicly. Montreal Island is not the destination for tens of thousands of vehicles sitting on Highway 25 South. It is the crossing point. Drivers from the North Shore, from Laval, from the West Island — people who have no business in Montreal’s east end — are routing through the island because the alternatives are either slower, more expensive, or more congested. Montreal’s highway network, built for a 1960s population and traffic model, is now absorbing the travel demand of a metropolitan area that grew significantly beyond what those roads were ever designed to handle. The A-25 approach between Rue Souligny and Rue Beaubien ranked 8th worst in Canada for congestion, with over 250,000 hours of delay yearly. Montreal ranked 9th most congested city in all of North America in 2023, alongside New York, Mexico City, and Vancouver. (2727coworking) 9th in North America. Not in Canada. In North America. With a fraction of the population of the cities around it on that list. A typical 10 km trip in Montreal that might take 12 to 15 minutes with no traffic can easily take 25 to 30 minutes or more during rush hour. (2727coworking) On Highway 25 South during peak periods, those numbers are not even in the same universe.
Roads That Were Never Meant for This The Lafontaine Tunnel was built in 1967. It is 55 years old, and it sees roughly 15,000 heavy trucks among the daily traffic volume. (CTV News) The highway approaches feeding it were largely designed in the same era — the 1950s through 1970s — for a city and a car culture that have both fundamentally transformed since then. Montreal’s highway system was largely built in the 1950s to 1970s and now requires extensive rehabilitation. Simultaneous major projects have meant constant construction-related lane closures and detours for years. (2727coworking) Nobody in Quebec’s government made a serious long-term plan to replace this infrastructure before it reached crisis point. Instead they waited until the walls started crumbling, discovered mid-renovation that everything was worse than the original estimates, doubled the budget, extended the timeline by years, installed radar cameras to harvest revenue from the drivers suffering through it, and called that infrastructure management. The president of the Quebec Order of Engineers was direct about it after a bridge partially collapsed in Châteauguay earlier this month: “We were surprised that something like that would happen, but at the same time, we’re not surprised because there’s a big deficit in our infrastructure in Quebec.” (CBC News) Not surprised. That is the most damning two words in this entire story. The people whose profession is to understand these structures were not surprised when one partially collapsed. Because the neglect has been visible for decades to anyone paying attention.
What Six Years of This Tells the World If you are a logistics company evaluating Montreal as a distribution hub, Highway 25 South is part of your cost calculation. Poor road conditions already cost the average Quebec driver $258 per year in vehicle repairs — more than double the Canadian national average. (Canadian Auto Dealer) Add unpredictable travel times, a construction corridor with no clear end date, radar cameras that penalize drivers for existing in the zone, and a government that has extended this project’s timeline repeatedly with no meaningful accountability — and Montreal’s competitive advantage as a logistics gateway starts looking significantly weaker than the brochure suggests. If you are a South Shore resident who has spent the last three years adding 45 minutes each way to a commute that used to take 15, you already know what this means. You have been paying for it in time, in fuel, in vehicle wear, and now in speeding tickets on a road the government itself cannot finish. And if you are anyone watching Quebec from the outside — in Ontario, in Alberta, in another country entirely — Highway 25 South in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon is not a traffic problem. It is a portrait of an institution that cannot plan, cannot execute, cannot learn from its own mistakes, and has decided that the best response to its own failures is to point a camera at the people living inside them and collect $335 a ticket. The road is not finished. It has not been finished in six years. It will not be finished until at least 2027. And somewhere near the tunnel entrance, the radar is already flashing.
SIIIOCULI — Intelligence. Sovereignty. Awareness. siiioculi.lilxbrxaker.com