Underutilized is relative to the built capacity. More importantly, it can never reach the built capacity due to constraints both east and west of the portion being looked at; near zero growth rate.
this is correct but I think the public debate on this matter needs to tone down the rhetoric on both sides. For the record, I am pretty neutral on these options so I am not trying to sway the debate one way or the other but.....
....repeatedly over the past few days I have seen (here and other places) the pro-tear down folks describe those 120k people a day as "a few drivers"....in the sentence "why would we spend and extra 500 million to save a few drivers 2 - 3 minutes" It is hardly the fault of those drivers, or current planners, that while 120k people a day is a large number it is not near the capacity of the road that was built decades ago.
Whenever we are discussing transit projects and the need to end congestion, we often here about how time is money and that the cumulative lost time that people/goods/services spent on our roads costs us +/-$6B a year in lost productivity (the number often moves around but that is the common refrain).....well if 120k vehicles are spending 3 minutes more each way per work day is that not 120k X 3 X 2 X 5 X 52 = 187,200,000 minutes (3,120,000 hours/130,000 days/356 years) of lost productivity per year? What is the cost of that?
Like I said, I am pretty neutral on this but watching the debate unfold it seems to be falling into the old "war on cars V why are drivers so important" pattern and if (as seems to be the case when we talk about investing in transit) we feel that productivity lost to congestion figure is real and important then we need to recognize that while 3 minutes on each individual drive is a low number....the cumulative effect is not. I think, also, if the 3 minutes is the measure and we believe that is worth the cost....when we measure the "cost" to get to that 3 minutes we recognize that (I believe) that is subject to other major expenditures (eg DRL) being made along with whatever we do with the east end of the Gardiner.
I will revert to being an interested spectator on this issue.