The SNC-Lavalin / GENIVAR project 2004

The SNC-Lavalin -Genivar project, given the choices they made

  1.  to locate the bridge on a location near the ferry necessitating a longer main span,
  2.  forcing the building of a 950m viaduct 60 meters high on the Tadoussac side to avoid a tunnel on the south side
  3.  to build the deck up to 140m high to reach the top of the mountain with a longitudinal ascendant slope toward the south side of 2.1%. 
  4. forcing the use of  an upper deck 25m wide, 4 lanes to stabilize the large structure while an upper deck 15 m wide with only 2 lanes plus a bike lane  was needed
  5. Such gigantic parameters explain the building period for the bridge of more than 9 years.

brought a very expensive project, using technologies now obsolete. The cost of the bridge itself would have been over 900M$ in 2013 while today, similar bridges can be built for less than 250M$.The total project would have cost  1 billion dollars on today dollar. These choice derailed the project for many years and induced the Quebec government decision to build the mega ferryboats  creating large groups of vehicles trapped in platoons exiting the ferry with the foreseeable consequences of  decreasing road security and fluidity, increasing exposure to the "Ferry Syndrome" and increasing traveling time between Tadoussac and Quebec city.

 

You can read the study by clicking on the following files (French version only available)

Newsletters

Impact of the proposed construction of a bridge over the river Saguenay 

Environmental section

Socioeconomic section

Technical section