Why does Godzilla attack the Pierre-Laporte bridge which connects Quebec City to Lévis in this drawing? And what is this famous “3rd link” that everyone is talking about? We’ll explain!
Take a good look at the image above this text! It’s a caricature drawn by André-Philippe Côté from the newspaper The sun. He imagined Godzilla, a giant monster well-known from the cinema, destroying one of the bridges in Quebec City.
The government turns around
On June 13, 2024, François Legault surprised everyone by agreeing to build a 3rd link. This is a new bridge-tunnel connecting Quebec and Lévis under the St. Lawrence River.
In April 2023, the Minister of Transport Geneviève Guilbeault, shown on the left in the drawing, announced that there would be no 3rd link. The government abandoned the project. She explained that it was necessary to concentrate economic resources on the maintenance of the two existing bridges. After all, there are already two bridges that connect the two banks: the Quebec Bridge and the Pierre-Laporte Bridge.
In case the bridge is no longer usable…
Recently we changed our minds and there is a lot of talk about building a new bridge to help trucks transporting goods from one side of the river to the other. For the moment, there is only one bridge that does this job: the Pierre-Laporte bridge. So the main idea is to build another bridge in case something happens to the first one. This is why André-Philippe Côté drew Godzilla. He imagines the monster destroying the bridge, as the only valid reason to build a new one. A caricature always exaggerates things, to make people laugh and think.
The Pierre-Laporte Bridge is only 54 years old, and bridges are normally built to last between 75 and 100 years. So is it a good idea to spend a lot of money now to build a new bridge if the old one still works just fine?
And what do the residents think?
In addition to the very high construction cost, some say that the 3rd link could cause even more traffic and therefore pollution in Quebec City. Some agree with the addition of a 3rd way to cross the river at this location. They say that if there were a problem with the Pierre-Laporte bridge, we would have to travel more than a hundred kilometres to get to the nearest bridge to cross the river, in Trois-Rivières! Others find that it is useless and that the money should be put into other more urgent projects for society, such as public transit for example, which is better for the environment.
And you, if you had to choose between repairing an existing bridge or building a new bridge, which would you choose?
