IT’S A SCAR ACROSS THE CITY, SEPARating the glass office towers of downtown Montreal from the stone, 17th-century heritage buildings of Old Montreal.

The trench highway known as the Ville Marie Expressway has been an eyesore since it was built in the 1970s. Today, more than 100,000 noisy, exhaust-spewing cars use it daily. The Ville Marie made headlines last year, when a 25-tonne chunk of the highway’s concrete broke off and fell onto the road, cementing Montreal’s reputation for crumbling infrastructure.

But when wise Montrealers look at the Ville Marie, they should see dollar signs. The space above the highway can be turned into valuable real estate that can help fill city coffers with tax revenue. It’s an idea that has both political and business support.

The Ville Marie is part elevated, part tunnel, part trench. Trench sections – about 1.5 kilometres in all – amount to a cavernous eyesore tourists have to contend with when they stroll between downtown hotels and restaurants on Old Montreal’s cobble-stoned streets.

Yet, the trench area has many assets. It’s served by the métro. It’s close to Chinatown, downtown and the bustling Quartier Latin. It’s also adjacent to the $2-billion Université de Montréal mega-hospital under construction.

There’s already evidence the trench can be rehabilitated. A decade ago, a section was covered to expand the city’s convention centre and to create the Quartier International de Montréal, a new business district that includes the headquarters of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. The city credits those projects with more than $1 billion in spinoffs.

Now, the new mega-hospital’s 14-storey research centre is going up over an already covered part of the Ville Marie. It’s at the heart of a planned “Quartier de la santé” – a hub for university health researchers and private life-sciences companies. Problem is, at the moment, theVille Marie trench sits on the location being eyed for the health hub.

This hub has powerful backers. It’s being shepherded by former Parti Québécois premier Pierre Marc Johnson and its partner is the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, the city’s biggest business voice.

Farther east, the CBC has a $1.6-billion plan that would see the new headquarters for its French service financed by the redevelopment of the sprawling property around its current home next to the Ville Marie trench. That project would include commercial and office space, as well as 2,000 housing units.

Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay backs both the health hub and the CBC redevelopment. A recent joint city/province study is rumoured to have found it would cost more than $1.5 billion to bury the Ville Marie but bring in double that in economic spinoffs. So far, Tremblay has refused to make the study public. He’s still trying to figure out how to persuade the new Parti Québécois government to help finance the projects.

With rare consensus around these projects, business on board and the city in need of a financial boost, Montreal and Quebec would do well to act quickly to eliminate the blight that is the Ville Marie. It should be dead and buried.

© 2012 Investment Executive. All rights reserved.