This weekend marks the grand finale of the 2026 UCI Road World Championships, and if you’re planning on driving anywhere near downtown Montreal, Mount Royal or the South Shore, you should start looking for alternatives now.
The elite women’s road bike race runs Saturday, September 26, followed by the elite men’s road race on Sunday, September 27, the two biggest events of the entire championship. Both are expected to draw enormous crowds, and with them, sweeping road closures across seven boroughs plus Westmount.
Mount Royal and downtown are essentially off-limits to cars
Every race in this championship finishes at the foot of Mount Royal on Parc Avenue, between Des Pins and Mont-Royal avenues, which is also hosting most of the race starts and the Fan Village. That stretch of Parc has been closed since early September and won’t reopen until October 4, since organizers built a temporary 200,000-person stadium right on the street.
Rafik Belmesk, Partner & Head of Strategy. A good creative idea is centred around an existent problem, in this case, the city of Montreal has blocked many roads in the centre of the city. So while the city is redirecting people, we thought we’d redirect them somewhere better: their next getaway.”
Garcí Iñigo, Vice-President, Marketingand Loyalty at Transat. At Transat, we want to be a brand that knows how to tap into the conversations happening around us and inspire people to travel. With ‘Barrez-vous,’ we’re turning a very Montreal inconvenience into a simple and unexpected invitation to change your scenery to something more convenient. It’s exactly how we see marketing: creativity rooted in culture, brought to life in a way that serves both the brand and our offers.
