Preferential treatment for buses between the downtown terminal and the Champlain Bridge includes a variety of elements that have been implemented over the years to respond to particular problems. However, specific problems continue to exist during the morning and afternoon peak hour periods. These problems should be resolved in order to improve the overall quality of service between the South Shore of Montreal and the downtown area.

Within this context, the objectives of the study included:

  • Analyzing the existing situation in the two sectors under study, “downtown” and “Bonaventure Autoroute – Technoparc”
  • Identification of the most appropriate measures to be taken in order to solve the problems revealed by the analysis
  • Evaluation of the feasibility as well as the impact of these measures by identifying mitigation methods aiming at making the measures more acceptable to the commuters

The following steps were employed during the study:

  • Quantifying and illustrating existing traffic problems by using a complete traffic model of the downtown area
  • Developing improvement scenarios and evaluating their technical feasibility
  • Evaluating the improvement scenarios by means of a multi-criteria analysis for the purpose of arriving at the best possible consensus between the AMT and its partners, while refining the selected solution and estimating the detailed costs