Even if you're argument was right (and its not). The highway this thread is about is not going to make much of a difference for the rest of the GTA either. In any direction.
The only purpose of this highway is to help increase development/property values around it. It will not help GTA traffic. The governement's own studies say it will save seconds.
There are 3.9 million jobs in the GTA. Approximately 650,000 are downtown, or about 16%. That's a small fraction to me.
There are approximately 7 million people living in the GTA - almost 10 million in the GGH - only about 275,000 live downtown. That's only 4%!
The simple reality is that while Downtown is important, and it has an outsized percentage of trips to it compared to it's land area, it still represents a small percentage of overall trips in the GTA. And this shows through in things like modal shares. Downtown Toronto has an automotive modal share of around 20-25%.. but yet GTA-wide, automotive modal shares are still 76% of trips. If the Downtown truly was a large chunk, yet alone a majority, of trips, that modal share would be lower.
It's also a big reason the highway matters. In the 905, automotive trips represent closer to 85-90% of total trips. Even with optimistic and aggressive efforts to drop that modal share, you are not going to completely eliminate the growth in total auto trips in these areas given underlying population growth trends. In an area with a 90% automotive modal share and 2% annual population growth (actually slower than many of these areas), you would need 20% annual public transit ridership growth to completely offset new automotive trips. And that would need to happen, in a compounding manner, every single year, for decades.
Somewhere like Brampton has famously done an excellent job driving transit use with some of the highest transit ridership of any suburban municipality on the continent, yet it's underlying population growth has meant that total automotive trips continue to grow quickly.
Also, the "save seconds" thing is wildly misconstrued. The GTA West corridor studies identified that the highway would result in an average travel time reduction of approximately 30 seconds - for
all trips taken in the GTA. So driving from Oakville to Burlington? or Oshawa to Toronto? The 413 will obviously not effect that trip time.. but that trip counts towards the average. So many, arguably the majority, of trips in the GTA are understandably not going to see any change as they occur nowhere close to the 413. But the trips that are influenced by the 413 will see much better improvements.
The same study identified that trips going from the 401/407 to 400 (i.e.. the route of the highway) would see travel times reduced by over
30 minutes. The fact that the project can reduce trip times across the entire metro area by 30 seconds on average is remarkable in itself and shows how large of an impact it will actually have.
This is a direct quote from the government website:
You may have heard that figure being cited a lot recently. But is it true?
Well actually, Highway 413 would save the people who use it up to 30 minutes each way.
The 30-second figure is from a study done in 2017 that looked at the average time savings across the entire Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH). It includes every trip on every road in every region – including places that are nowhere near the proposed Highway 413. So, a trip from Oshawa to Whitby for example, or from Niagara to St. Catharines would be included in that average.
Of course, on any given day once it’s built, most people in the GGH won’t use the Highway 413. Just like most people today don’t use Highway 401, or Highway 427, or the DVP. Thousands do, but most of us don’t.
So, will Highway 413 make a significant difference for someone travelling from Hamilton to Niagara Falls? Of course not. But for the people who live, work or travel through the western part of the GTA it would have a huge impact. People who travel the full length of the highway – from Vaughan to Milton – would save up to 30 minutes each way. That’s a life-changing amount of time. It’s the difference between calling home to say goodnight and tucking your kids into bed yourself.
It's like looking at the benefits of the Ontario Line, one of the most important infrastructure projects in Ontario. It will save lots of time for hundreds of thousands of riders. A trip from Thorncliffe Park to Exhibition will go from like 1.5 hours on the TTC to under 30 minutes. But we too can make the Ontario Line look "useless" if we instead measure the average amount of time saved per TTC rider across the entire TTC network.. because most TTC riders won't use the Ontario Line! Some riders will save an hour.. most will save none. So the average may end up being a few seconds saved. But that doesn't make it useless!
