Roads: Highway 401 Widening - Highway 8 to Highway 410 (MTO, U/C, Planned)

[Admiral Beez]

Whenever I fly home from Europe and I look down at the sixteen or twenty lanes of the 401 I can’t help but feel we’ve failed.

 

[nfitz]

All that extra westbound space does open the possibility of connecting the highway 8 bypass to the western side of the 401 with flyovers.

Wow. I moved to KW back in the mid-1980s when they were building the expressway section of highway 8 from the Grand to the 401. At the time the rest of the interchange - and the extension of expressway 8 to form a by-pass highway around Cambridge on the west side of the Grand to Galt was always considered imminent. Nice to see it finally see at least the interchange being finished 40-years later.

Doesn't look like there's any hope there for the long-since cancelled new Highway 8 bypass.

 

[innsertnamehere]

Wow. I moved to KW back in the mid-1980s when they were building the expressway section of highway 8 from the Grand to the 401. At the time the rest of the interchange - and the extension of expressway 8 to form a by-pass highway around Cambridge on the west side of the Grand to Galt was always considered imminent. Nice to see it finally see at least the interchange being finished 40-years later.

Doesn't look like there's any hope there for the long-since cancelled new Highway 8 bypass.

Don't get your hopes up - MTO has no funding to actually build those ramps. The Grand River bridge replacement simply protects for them.

 

[nfitz]

Don't get your hopes up - MTO has no funding to actually build those ramps. The Grand River bridge replacement simply protects for them.

Ah, kind of like when MTO (or MTC back then) built the extra-wide section of 8 at Wellington in the 1960s, so they could build the intersection for new 7 ... still waiting after about 60 years.

 

[ARG1]

Whenever I fly home from Europe and I look down at the sixteen or twenty lanes of the 401 I can’t help but feel we’ve failed.

I suggest turning your thinking around. The reason we have 16-20 lines of 401, is because we built that instead of building new highways in other places by bulldozing communities (which is what was done throughout much of the US). We got the 401, so that that the bulk of Old Toronto would be freeway free (minus the DVP and Gardiner).

Even by international standards, Toronto doesn't have a lot of freeways. Even in an "urbanist paradise" like Amsterdam, as soon as you reach 5km away from downtown, you arrive in freeway hell and a never ending criss-cross of them everywhere.

 

[Bojaxs]

I suggest turning your thinking around. The reason we have 16-20 lines of 401, is because we built that instead of building new highways in other places by bulldozing communities (which is what was done throughout much of the US). We got the 401, so that that the bulk of Old Toronto would be freeway free (minus the DVP and Gardiner).

Even by international standards, Toronto doesn't have a lot of freeways. Even in an "urbanist paradise" like Amsterdam, as soon as you reach 5km away from downtown, you arrive in freeway hell and a never ending criss-cross of them everywhere.

The failure of the 401 isn't that it's so wide, but that so many cars still use it. The 401's purpose is to move freight along the most populated corridor within Canada and to ease trade between Canada and the U.S.

If Canada were geographically blessed with a commercial waterway similar to the Mississippi River or the Rhine River, we could put more freight on barges and probably wouldn't need to make the 401 so wide.

This is why I'm big on improving VIA and GO train services, because trucks shouldn't be getting bogged down in traffic on the 401 due to a lack of regional transit options for car drivers.

 

[crs1026]

The failure of the 401 isn't that it's so wide, but that so many cars still use it. The 401's purpose is to move freight along the most populated corridor within Canada and to ease trade between Canada and the U.S.

If Canada were geographically blessed with a commercial waterway similar to the Mississippi River or the Rhine River, we could put more freight on barges and probably wouldn't need to make the 401 so wide.

This is why I'm a big on improving VIA and GO train services, because trucks shouldn't be getting bogged down in traffic on the 401 due to a lack of regional transit options for car drivers.

Thanks to being on the lake, Toronto (and Southern Ontario, actually) has a single east-west axis where a landlocked city would collect and disperse travellers in all directions.

We have to play that ball where it lies - it is what it is. As noted, Toronto has successfully resisted creation of a grid of expressways in the core. We should be eternally grateful for that decision, even if the price is a 401 on steroids.

Cross-Toronto transit could be a whole lot better, but where is the data showing what the detailed breakdown is ? How many cars travel all the way from Pickering to Mississauga, versus joining or leaving at an intermediate ramp ? I think we need a bit more data before we deem the 401 as "bad".

- Paul