Montreal has a traffic problem, and it’s not the kind you can fix with another lane. The data paints a picture of a city where congestion is worsening year over year, carpooling is nearly nonexistent, and the solutions on the table keep ignoring the simplest one: filling the empty seats already on the road.
How much time do Montreal commuters lose in traffic?
Montreal commuters lost an average of 63 hours to traffic congestion in 2025 — more than two and a half full days sitting in their cars going nowhere. That figure comes from INRIX’s 2025 Global Traffic Scorecard, and it makes Montreal the worst major city in Canada for wasted commute time.
TomTom’s 2025 Traffic Index tells the same story: Montreal drivers lost 89 hours to rush-hour traffic over the year — fourth worst in Canada — and congestion still rose 0.7% over 2024. In practical terms, a commute that should take 12 minutes is routinely stretching past 20.
This isn’t just frustration. It’s measurable economic damage. Wasted fuel, lost productivity, higher stress, worse air quality. Every hour stuck in traffic is an hour not spent with family, at work, or doing anything that matters.
How many Montrealers actually carpool?
Only 4.6% of Montreal commuters carpool, and the average vehicle occupancy is just 1.1 people per car. That statistic from Statistics Canada’s census commuting data means the vast majority of cars on Montreal roads are carrying one person and four empty seats.
There’s an irony here. Montreal actually has one of the lowest car-commuter shares among Canada’s 15 largest census metropolitan areas, at 70.0% — behind only Toronto. The city has invested heavily in transit, cycling infrastructure, and densification. Yet when Montrealers do drive, they drive alone. The carpooling rate hasn’t meaningfully budged in decades. See how Rydze is changing this in the Montreal area.
Think about what 1.1 occupancy means at scale. If there are 800,000 cars on Montreal-area roads during rush hour, roughly 720,000 of them have nobody in the passenger seat. The road capacity is there. The seats are there. The coordination is what’s missing.
Which corridors are the worst?
The Autoroute Métropolitaine (A-40) carries approximately 190,000 vehicles per day, making it one of the busiest highways in Canada. During peak hours, it routinely grinds to a crawl across its central section. Five of Canada’s 20 worst traffic bottlenecks are in the Montreal region.
The South Shore-to-downtown corridor is particularly brutal. Commuters crossing the Champlain Bridge or the Jacques Cartier Bridge face stop-and-go conditions that can double or triple expected travel times. The North Shore corridor via the A-15 and A-19 is similarly congested, with merge points and construction creating daily choke points.
These aren’t corridors that can be widened. The land is built out. The bridges are maxed. The only variable left to change is how many people are in each vehicle.
Is congestion getting better or worse?
Worse, and accelerating. INRIX data shows a 20% increase in hours lost to congestion from 2022 to 2023. The brief reprieve from pandemic-era remote work has evaporated. Return-to-office mandates have pushed commuters back onto roads that were already at capacity before 2020.
By 2024, Montreal was on track to exceed its pre-pandemic 2019 congestion levels. In its 2025 scorecard, INRIX ranked the city among the 30 most congested in the world — ahead of cities with significantly larger populations. Per capita, Montreal punches well above its weight in gridlock.
Construction makes it worse. Montreal’s aging infrastructure means perpetual roadwork on major arteries. The Turcot Interchange reconstruction, ongoing bridge maintenance, and water main repairs create a rotating set of bottlenecks that never fully resolve. Drivers adapt by finding alternate routes, which overloads residential streets and secondary roads.
What would it take to fix this?
Not new highways. Not another decade-long infrastructure megaproject. The math is simpler than that. If just 10% of single-occupancy drivers picked up one passenger, it would remove tens of thousands of cars from Montreal roads during peak hours. That’s an immediate, measurable reduction in congestion — no construction required.
This is a coordination problem, not an infrastructure problem. The seats exist. The drivers exist. The routes overlap. What’s been missing is a way to match them in real time, without pre-planning, without awkward arrangements, and without turning drivers into gig workers. That’s exactly what Rydze does.
Every car that goes from one occupant to two is one fewer car that needs to be on the road. Multiply that across 800,000 daily commuters and the numbers stop being theoretical. They become the difference between a 63-hour annual traffic tax and something meaningfully lower.
Montreal doesn’t need more roads. It needs fewer empty seats.