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Could rail have substituted Toronto's Urban Highways?

Broadly speaking, certainly do have technically impressively engineered bypasses but even most major cities in Europe and America, their residents live much closer to a freeway (albeit fewer lanes). We simply concentrated a lot of lanes onto fewer freeways.
 
TheTigerMaster said:
I get that the 401 is wide, but how does the length of highways in Toronto compare to elsewhere?
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The most meaningful measure may be in numbers of freeways touching the center, rather than in absolute lane-miles. Lots of cities have a ring-road expressway - lots of miles, but actually good in that cars can go around the city without going into it. Toronto was fortunate in that for several decades only one cross town bridge route (401) was needed, and it started out in empty fields so did not displace anything.

Toronto has only six lanes of access to the center (3 DVP and 3 Gardiner). The 400 and Allen Expressway terminate far enough out of the center to not impact it.

When I think about highway blight, it's the cities that have the most expressways pushed into the central city that have decayed the most. Having a junction of two expressways in the center is the most toxic of all.....all those elevated ramps and inhospitable, unwalkable spaces.

- Paul
 
mdrejhon said:
Broadly speaking, certainly do have technically impressively engineered bypasses but even most major cities in Europe and America, their residents live much closer to a freeway (albeit fewer lanes). We simply concentrated a lot of lanes onto fewer freeways.
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Good point. It's interesting to compare Montreal with Toronto. Toronto went the "a few really big highways" route, while Montreal went with the "many more smaller highways" route.
 
crs1026 said:
I would argue that Toronto was lucky rather than farsighted. Toronto lagged behind other North American cities in building freeways because we were backwaterish and cautious - and cheap, not because we were smart.
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A lot of US freeway money came from the federal government via the Interstate program. Luckily our federal government didn't follow suit.
 
innsertnamehere said:
Ontario shying away from freeways is a fallacy. It has the largest freeways on the planet. The 401 is both the widest (18 lanes) and busiest globally. The fact that the bypass of the bypass (407) has 12 lanes is nuts by any global standard, but is treated as normal for Toronto.
MTO is a global leader of highway design, and Ontario is up there with Texas as the "highway capitals" of North America if such a title were to exist.
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The M25 (a ring road) in London is 12 lanes at points. And most other freeways around London are 6+ lanes.

Paris had whole neighbourhoods destroyed to make the grand avenues. You could consider them the predecessor of the highways we have today. And they are 10+ lanes.

Beloved Barcelona has a 6-8 lane road going right along the waterfront (reminds you of anything in Toronto?)

Madrid has 3 (or 4?) ring roads each with more than 6 lanes.

And if you want to go global go to China to see what large highways really are.

So I wouldn't call Toronto anything out of the norm.
 
Well, Toronto is out of the norm in the scale of the freeways. The network isn't as long in terms of highway kms maybe, but the highways are larger than anywhere else. As I said, the 401 is literally the widest and busiest globally. Then there is the 12 lane 407, 14 lane 400, 14 lane 427, 14 lane 403, 10 lane 404, 10 lane 410, 10 lane Gardiner, etc.

Our urban highways are pretty small by north american standards, but the suburban freeways are the largest globally. Its not that 10 lane highways don't exist elsewhere, its just that Toronto's aren't 10 lanes. They go up to 18.

Texas may beat Toronto on the widest and busiest highway soon though, they are currently planning on reconfiguring Houstons downtown freeway network that would make (I believe) a 22 lane wide stretch of highway.
 
innsertnamehere said:
Texas may beat Toronto on the widest and busiest highway soon though, they are currently planning on reconfiguring Houstons downtown freeway network that would make (I believe) a 22 lane wide stretch of highway.
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Houston's apparently overtaken the 401 with a 26 lane stretch. The IH-10 now has "12 main lanes (six in each direction), eight feeder lanes and six managed lanes. The managed lanes carry mass transit and high-occupancy vehicles during peak hours and are made available to single-occupancy vehicles for a toll fee during off-peak periods."
 
The grand boulevards of Paris are nothing like the freeways in North America. They're quite the opposite - streets lined with retail and active ground floor uses, extra wide sidewalks, and landscape buffering between pedestrians and traffic. They show how large arterial roadways can be people magnets...what University Avenue and the emerging Highway 7 could be (or could have been) if done right. I can't think of anywhere in Canada that has pulled off the same concept.
 
MisterF said:
The grand boulevards of Paris are nothing like the freeways in North America. They're quite the opposite - streets lined with retail and active ground floor uses, extra wide sidewalks, and landscape buffering between pedestrians and traffic. They show how large arterial roadways can be people magnets...what University Avenue and the emerging Highway 7 could be (or could have been) if done right. I can't think of anywhere in Canada that has pulled off the same concept.
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I was using Paris as an example of how it actually destroyed neighbourhoods. Napolean wanted to be able to suppress his people so he razed whole neighbourhoods to create these roads (so he can bring the army against his own citizens) and then gave the land beside them to his cronies for their mansions. So not something I would want to emulate.

Actually it can be a good comparison for the revised Lake Shore road. We are spending millions/billions to create a nice street just so that a developer can build a few condo's on the lake. Same can be said with the Unilever lands.

Historically if you look at Toronto we may be able to say the same thing about the old Ward.
 
The Katy freeway in Houston has a bunch of lanes on service roads beside it that they count as "freeway" lanes, but pretty clearly aren't. The 26 number counts ramps too from what I remember. In terms of actual useable freeway lanes, it's 16 lanes, which the 401 with its 18 lanes still beats.
 
innsertnamehere said:
The Katy freeway in Houston has a bunch of lanes on service roads beside it that they count as "freeway" lanes, but pretty clearly aren't. The 26 number counts ramps too from what I remember. In terms of actual useable freeway lanes, it's 16 lanes, which the 401 with its 18 lanes still beats.
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This seems to be true. The lanes beside it get counted, but have traffic signals, so they clearly aren't freeway lanes.

Either way, I'm not sure this is a contest that Toronto wants to be winning.
 
Catenary said:
This seems to be true. The lanes beside it get counted, but have traffic signals, so they clearly aren't freeway lanes.

Either way, I'm not sure this is a contest that Toronto wants to be winning.
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Look at the bright side: one giant highway is better than having a dozen smaller highways ruining more of the city. I'd pick a giant 401, over a Richview and Spadina expressway any day.
 
crs1026 said:
The most meaningful measure may be in numbers of freeways touching the center, rather than in absolute lane-miles. Lots of cities have a ring-road expressway - lots of miles, but actually good in that cars can go around the city without going into it. Toronto was fortunate in that for several decades only one cross town bridge route (401) was needed, and it started out in empty fields so did not displace anything.

Toronto has only six lanes of access to the center (3 DVP and 3 Gardiner). The 400 and Allen Expressway terminate far enough out of the center to not impact it.

When I think about highway blight, it's the cities that have the most expressways pushed into the central city that have decayed the most. Having a junction of two expressways in the center is the most toxic of all.....all those elevated ramps and inhospitable, unwalkable spaces.

- Paul
Click to expand...

Not building the Spadina expressway is without doubt one of the best decisions this city made last century.
 
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