If you cross between the South Shore and Montreal's east end, you don't need anyone to tell you the La Fontaine tunnel is a problem. You've lived it every weekday morning since the fall of 2022: the merge that starts kilometres before the entrance, the crawl through what used to be a five-minute drive, the mental math about whether leaving twenty minutes earlier is worth twenty fewer minutes of sleep. What you might not have fully absorbed is how much longer this is going to last.
The numbers behind the bottleneck
The Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel normally carries about 120,000 vehicles a day between Longueuil and Montreal. Since October 31, 2022, three of its six lanes have been closed for a major renovation — half the tunnel's capacity, gone, on one of the busiest crossings in the region. Squeeze 120,000 daily vehicles through three lanes and you get exactly what commuters have been getting: chronic congestion that radiates out onto Highway 20, Highway 25, and every alternative route drivers flee to.
And the finish line keeps moving. The renovation was originally supposed to be done by November 2025. According to CBC's reporting on the project, completion has slipped to late autumn 2026, with some work continuing into 2027. In other words: this is not almost over. Plan for at least another year of a half-capacity tunnel, and treat any earlier reopening as a pleasant surprise rather than a promise.
Option one: shift your schedule
The cheapest fix is the least glamorous one. Congestion at the tunnel is sharply peaked — the worst of it is concentrated in the classic rush-hour windows. If your work allows any flexibility at all, crossing before the morning peak builds or after it collapses can reclaim a surprising amount of your day. The same goes for hybrid schedules: if you can pick which days you go in, avoiding Monday and Friday crossings during peak hours is one of the few levers entirely within your control.
It's not a solution for shift workers, parents doing daycare runs, or anyone whose hours are fixed. But if you've been sitting in the 8 a.m. crawl out of habit rather than necessity, it's worth an honest look at whether 7 a.m. or 9:30 a.m. would work.
Option two: transit
For South Shore commuters headed downtown, the métro's yellow line from Longueuil remains the most congestion-proof way across the river — no lanes to close, no merge to survive. Exo buses and park-and-ride lots feed into it, and for trips into the city centre, the combination often beats sitting in tunnel traffic even when you account for the transfer. The honest caveat: transit works best if you're going downtown. If your job is in an industrial park in Anjou or along the 40, the transit trip can be long enough that the tunnel, even wounded, still wins.
Option three: the Covoiturage ARTM pilot
Here's the option most commuters have never heard of, which is a shame, because it was created specifically for this closure. In May 2023, the ARTM launched Covoiturage ARTM, a free carpooling app built as a mitigation measure for the tunnel renovation. The model is simple: drivers who are already crossing get paid between $0.34 and $0.54 per kilometre for taking passengers along, and the ARTM reports that a typical Longueuil-to-downtown trip costs a passenger about $1.09. That is a genuinely good deal — less than a transit fare for a door-to-door ride.
The pilot's weakness has never been the economics. It's awareness and liquidity: a carpool app only works when enough drivers and riders are on it at the same time, and the ARTM has done little consumer marketing. But if you cross the tunnel daily, it costs you nothing to try, and every car it fills is one fewer car in the queue ahead of you.
Why carpooling is the structural answer
Zoom out and the logic gets hard to argue with. The alternatives to the tunnel are not exactly empty: according to La Presse, the Samuel-De Champlain bridge carries roughly 130,000 vehicles a day and the Jacques-Cartier about 90,000, and together those two crossings account for 46% of trips between the South Shore and Montreal. There is no underused route to divert to. Every crossing is at or near capacity, which means the only way to move more people across the river is to move more people per car.
Most of those cars carry one person. The driver crawling through the tunnel next to you is, functionally, an empty bus with one occupant — and so are you, if you're driving alone. Filling those seats doesn't require new infrastructure, new lanes, or another five-year construction project. It requires making it trivially easy for a driver who's already crossing to pick someone up along the way. That's what the ARTM pilot gestures at, and it's the problem we've been working on too. When we launch Rydze in Montreal, the idea will be the same one that makes the ARTM pilot sensible: drivers picking up riders along routes they were already driving, for a flat $3.75. Until then, the pilot exists today, and it's free.
The realistic playbook
So, until the cones come down sometime in 2027: shift your crossing times if your schedule allows it. Take the yellow line when downtown is the destination. Try the Covoiturage ARTM pilot — it was built for exactly this. And if you're driving through the tunnel alone every day, consider that the fastest way to shrink the queue is for fewer of us to be in it, one filled seat at a time. The tunnel will eventually get its six lanes back. Your habits between now and then are the only part of this you actually control.