Montreal's Trudeau airport braces for more traffic chaos ahead of spring break

Travellers walk through traffic with their luggage as they try to catch their flights at Montréal Trudeau International Airport, in Montreal, Thursday, Sept. 7, 2023. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christinne Muschi)

The vehicle traffic around Montréal 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.

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.

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.

While that number is a little less than last year — due to the cancellation of flights to Cuba over fuel shortages — she said travellers will need to be patient.

“We are fully aware that it’s more difficult coming to the airport, so that’s why we’re … asking people really to prepare their trip,” she said in an interview Thursday.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“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.

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.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 27, 2026.