The potholes on Lacroix Street plague Nina Fragapane every morning when she tries to park at the Angrignon metro station. The road leading to the parking lot is littered with holes and crumbling asphalt. “It looks like craters on the moon, some of them are really big,” she says. Fragapane says she has called 311 or used the city’s app to report potholes near the metro station nearly 20 times since 2023. “Usually, they’re very good, they come the next day, they patch up the holes, but this year, they’re falling behind,” she said in an interview. She has made several complaints this year and a few are now marked as completed on the app, but she says nothing looks fixed. “It’s horrendous because you have to swerve, you have to go slowly,” she said. Taxi driver Dave Dhillon navigates the potholes every day when he drops clients off at the station. “This is the worst I have seen,” he says. “There’s so many, it’s very hard to avoid.” While he’s used to swerving around potholes when driving into the parking lot, he suspects many people’s cars are being damaged. “People who come here once in a while, I’m sure they damage their wheels,” he said. The City of Montreal declined CTV News’ request for an interview but in an email it says it is working to prevent potholes in the long term, allocating $683 million for resurfacing programs in the city’s 2026–2035 infrastructure plan. It adds boroughs are responsible for deploying crews to repair potholes on the city’s roads. “To support the boroughs in this responsibility, last month we awarded ten contracts for pothole repair on the arterial road network, in addition to transferring more funds to the boroughs. In total, 14,845 potholes were repaired under these contracts, which covered the entire territory.” The city also says residents should call 311 to flag potholes they encounter, but Fragapane says that hasn’t worked out for her lately. “I would like to see long-lasting work, not things that we have to repair every, every few months.”
