MONTREAL \u2014 The vehicle traffic around Montr\u00e9al Trudeau International Airport has been a source of frustration in recent years, prompting passengers at times to haul their suitcases on foot along the roadway to avoid missing flights.<\/p>\n
MONTREAL \u2014 The vehicle traffic around Montr\u00e9al Trudeau International Airport has been a source of frustration in recent years, prompting passengers at times to haul their suitcases on foot along the roadway to avoid missing flights.<\/p>\n
Now, Montreal’s airport authority is urging travellers to prepare for further traffic headaches as the busy spring break season lands amid a major airport revamp and the demolition of a parking garage.<\/p>\n
Airport spokesperson Anne-Sophie Hamel says some 58,000 passengers are expected to travel through the airport each day over the next 10 days or so. And while that number is a little less than last year \u2014 due to the cancellation of flights to Cuba over fuel shortages \u2014 she said travellers will need to be patient.<\/p>\n
“We are fully aware that it’s more difficult coming to the airport, so that’s why we’re \u2026 asking people really to prepare their trip,” she said in an interview Thursday.<\/p>\n
The surge in traffic comes as the airport is demolishing a parking garage, resulting in thousands fewer parking spots and more cars in main drop-off zones.<\/p>\n
Hamel says the airport has added two alternative pickup and drop-off areas with shuttle service to the terminal, and is urging travellers to reserve parking spots in advance and arrive at least three hours early for their flights.<\/p>\n
While the airport has installed the extra drop-off zones as a mitigation measure, Hamel says the fundamental problem is that the airport’s infrastructure is at capacity. “Our main drop off was built for a number way less than the number of passengers that we receive every day and every year,” she said. <\/p>\n
The airport will open new permanent drop-off zones by 2028 as part of a 10-year, $10-billion plan to increase passenger capacity and reconfigure the access points to the airport, she said.<\/p>\n
Work includes a complete reconfiguration of the road network leading to the terminal and the demolition of the multi-level parking garage for a new, larger parking facility. The airport authority also plans to build a new building that will connect the terminal to the future light rail station, expected to be operational by 2027. It announced last June that it had negotiated a $1-billion loan from the Canada Infrastructure Bank to help finance construction.<\/p>\n
Hamel said the authority has wanted to renovate since before the COVID-19 pandemic, but, inconveniently, had to wait until passenger traffic picked up again to pay for it.<\/p>\n
“It would have been ideal to have started to do this construction when we had nearly no passengers coming into Montreal-Trudeau, but we didn’t have the means to do that because we didn’t have passengers,” she explained. “That’s the way the Canadian airport model is built.”<\/p>\n
As a result, the airport has to manage the major construction effort while operating a busy flight hub with people coming and going 24 hours a day. The saying “rebuilding the plane while flying” comes to mind, though Hamel prefers a different metaphor. <\/p>\n
“Doing construction on an airport site is like welcoming 30 of your closest friends home while you’re in the midst of rebuilding your kitchen, your bathroom and you have a pipe that just leaked in your living room,” she said.<\/p>\n
However, she said the future drop-off zones will have triple the capacity of the current ones, while the light-rail station and reconfigured road network should eventually put an end to the biggest traffic woes.<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 27, 2026.<\/p>\n
Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MONTREAL \u2014 The vehicle traffic around Montr\u00e9al Trudeau International Airport has been a source of frustration in recent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502893,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194292],"tags":[49,48,2338],"class_list":["post-502892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-montreal","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-montreal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}