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Roads: GTA West Corridor—Highway 413

I pretty much agree with your assessments, spmarshall. I definitely wouldn't want to see Fergus and Elora become sprawlholes either.

Some of these lines are definitely just a highway geek's fantasies, though. Nobody has ever, even hypothetically or remotely, talked about a Waterloo North-West highway. They're building a new arterial (or at least connecting disjointed ones) out there, but there is definitely no consideration of an expressway.

The Owen Sound/Collingwood idea is definitely a semi-serious proposal. It's at least been discussed. I think Jim Wilson, the MPP for the Collingwood area, was an influential supporter back when he was in government. It might make sense as a branch from the 400, but as an extension of the 410 it's pretty ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is the Ottawa Beltway. I really can't figure out the point of that one.
 
With all those little connector highways, that plan looks so...American...
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It seems like at least the Americans planned their highways with the idea of connecting major cities with each other. The Ontario plan according to the map above doesn't seem to follow any sort of logic, except maybe to encourage sprawl all over Southern Ontario. That map doesn't remind me of American planning... it reminds me more of the way China plans for everything from expressways to high speed rail to subway lines.

One question that really puzzles me whenever I look at a road map of Southern Ontario is why there is no direct expressway connection between Toronto and Ottawa. Wouldn't it be more logical to build this direct link between the province's two largest metro areas before building this maze of highways around the GTA?
 
SPM has better eyes than me, I didn't even notice the NW Waterloo link. But it is worth noting that except for a few tiny exceptions, all the red lines on that map are either serious proposals that I've heard about before or "logical" extensions.

Wylie makes a good point; we're moved away from expressways as links between major cities and towards a "grid" of highways. The decentralisation of society continues... sprawl on.
 
^^^ The map isn't on a national scale and I'm not talking about segments like the 400 extension - look at what's planned for Vaughan, Peel, etc., and you'll see that it's a sprawlly grid of highways for no real reason other than creating a sprawlly grid of highways, like LA or Minneapolis, where you're never more than 2 miles from an expressway. When I said connector I meant "superfluous highway connecting other highways" not connecting two cities (although there's some of those in the plan, too). Imagine what would be planned if Lake Ontario wasn't in the way...they'd be proposing about 4 beltways.

edited to add ^'s
 
Dense freeway networks don't necessarily lead to sprawl. The Ruhrgebiet and the Dutch Ring cities are linked with a spider web of freeways as extensive as LA's, but don't exhibit anything resembling the sprawl of what has blanketed North America. These areas also, however, offer a competing rail network.
 
The worst sprawl of freeways I've seen in Canada is Quebec City. It reminds me of a midsized US rustbelt city with freeways all over that were built anticipating growth that didn't really come. And wow does Québec sprawl.

I was told that the reason Québec's got so many highways is political, not only to pay off friendly contracting firms, but to give La Capitale Nationale the same as Montréal - Montréal got the Décarie, Québec gets the 73 Nord. Montréal gets the Metropolitanne, Québec gets the Félix-LeClerc. The 440 vs the Ville-Marie, and so on. Of course, the highway shields and numbering scheme is taken straight out of the Interstate system.
 
The 401/416 does the job fairly well for Toronto-Ottawa. Actually, the back way via 115 and 7 is relatively fast as well.

I think the ultimate Collingwood-Owen Sound result will be 410 to Orangeville with a 4-lane 10 to 89, and a branch off the 400. I think something to relieve Highway 26 in the Barrie area (perhaps a super 2/dual carriageway coming off the 400 south of Mapleview and heading north say along the old 131 alignment and up to 26 might help, but that would be the extent of what I would do, apart from 26 New around Wasaga/Stayner).
 
"Dense freeway networks don't necessarily lead to sprawl. The Ruhrgebiet and the Dutch Ring cities are linked with a spider web of freeways as extensive as LA's, but don't exhibit anything resembling the sprawl of what has blanketed North America. These areas also, however, offer a competing rail network."

I guess it's possible that all these new highways will travel through the Moraine and Escarpment but leave them intact and sprawl-free...but for some nagging reason I need to doubt this, even with all the greenbelt legislation. We'll see.
 
Maybe a contest for the most out-of-this world MTO projects:

Here's some examples:
Highway 6 expressway from Hamilton to Highway 417. Six lanes from Highway 403 to Fergus, four lanes the rest of the way up. Full expressway branches from Durham to Walkerton and from Mount Forest to Highway 410 at Dundalk. Suspension Bridge called the Trillium Bridge will provide a fxed link to Manitoulin Island rivalling the Mackninac, making the world's largest freshwater island open for business. Silvio de Gasperis buys everything from Gore Bay to Little Current for his Deerview Estates for Italians looking for the next big thing after Woodbridge.

Highway 444 from Sudbury to Highway 101 in Timmins. Connecting with Timmins Beltway to expressways to Wawa, Rouyn-Noranda and Highway 455 to Kapuskasing as well as a six-lane Highway 11 south.
 
I hate that when a transit project is built, it is knocked down by skeptics who believe it ought to be sustainable, and as low in cost as the needs require, but road construction is obviously held to a different standard. How else would you explain a four lane macadam blasted through the rocks to serve distant Parry Sound? Or the gleaming concrete ribbon of Highway 115 to my home town of Peterborough?

We build freeways out into the cornfields with the excuse that it spurs development, but we build transit projects (if they are built) to "relieve congestion". This kind of double standard has largely shaped the amorphous, sprawl of North American cities since Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act.

Up until then, the dominant transportation mode of the day was run by private enterprise that paid its own way. It's not like the Roosevelt administration contributed to quadruple-tracking and electrifying the Pennsylvania Railroad's Northeast corridor in 1933. It's not like the state of California built the Pacific Electric system. It's not like the government of Ontario built the CN mainline from Montreal to Windsor. Even the first roads were toll roads that were priced to reflect the true cost of driving, like the 407.

James Howard Kunstler is a hot-headed idiot, but he's dead on when he says that sprawl is "the biggest misallocation of resources in the history of the world". The countless billions, or even trillions, that have been spent in NA in the last 60 years in maintaining an unsustainable form of transportation and living is downright egregious. It comes in all forms, from paving roads and installing infrastructure to the funding the hidden social costs of the resulting inner city blight, white flight and suburban isolation, all the way to the hopeless war in Iraq. Continuing to orient our communities toward auto-centric spraw is callous, ugly, socially destructive, short-sighted, and selfish. It will ultimately result in the death of the North American economy and way of life.
 
it's called the american dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
 
How else would you explain a four lane macadam blasted through the rocks to serve distant Parry Sound? Or the gleaming concrete ribbon of Highway 115 to my home town of Peterborough?
Click to expand...
Parry Sound is less than 1/10th the size of Peterborough and the 115 is a lot busier than the 400 in that area. But the 400 to Parry Sound is nothing - it's being extended all the way to Sudbury over the next 10 years. After that I could see them doing the 417 across NE Ontario.

spmarshall - were those actual proposals?? A 4-lane Hwy 144 would be just crazy.
 
spmarshall - were those actual proposals?? A 4-lane Hwy 144 would be just crazy.
Click to expand...

There are proposals to twin a short section of 144 closest to Sudbury, actually! It would mean that this would be the first highway to go from a secondary highway (used to be 544) to a King's Highway (144) to an expressway.

I was getting carried away with the 444 and the Manitoulin Island expressway and Timmins Beltway, though. Can you come up with anything zanier?
 
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