Roads: Ontario/GTA Highways Discussion

[Steve X]

Nice! This highway is going to be a huge boost to north-south vehicle capacity in Vaughan and Brampton, I'm hopeful it will relieve a lot of pressure off the 400 and 410.

The only highway getting relief is Highway 50!

 

[Woodbridge_Heights]

The only highway getting relief is Highway 50!

And 27

 

[toaster29]

And the 410. And the 401. There are a lot of people in Brampton and Caledon who might choose to travel east first to this highway, instead of going a little West to the 410/401.

 

[robmausser]

And the 410. And the 401. There are a lot of people in Brampton and Caledon who might choose to travel east first to this highway, instead of going a little West to the 410/401.

This highway would show its full potential if it were connected to the 410/400/404 by a West GTA highway, but I digress...

 

[Steve X]

And the 410. And the 401. There are a lot of people in Brampton and Caledon who might choose to travel east first to this highway, instead of going a little West to the 410/401.

They are 12km apart. If you live 2-3km from the 410, it is generally faster to just go west.

I would think this case is true in morning commute for 427>409>401 to avoid the bottleneck, otherwise the 410 is faster.

 

[matthewd]

Nice! This highway is going to be a huge boost to north-south vehicle capacity in Vaughan and Brampton, I'm hopeful it will relieve a lot of pressure off the 400 and 410.

I definitely agree. It will reduce the pressure between the two busy freeways. If the 427 gets further extended into Barrie, that would be really beneficial and would relieve the pressure on the 400 and Hwy 27. Also a future 410 extension into Orangeville and beyond could work too. Could help relieve the pressure of Hwy. 10 and the alternates like Kennedy, Airport Road and Heart Lake Road.

 

[W. K. Lis]

See http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/traveller/trip/traffic_cameras_list.shtml

 

[CityStay]

Yes, this will relieve pressure - for a few years. Then it will again be rammed due to induced demand and another round of widenings will be called for and so on and so on and so on.. The endless cycle of widenings and increased traffic congestion will follow the predictable path. We only have 70 years of evidence to go by. Maybe we need 100?

Too bad transit can't be expanded as quickly effortlessly as roads are expanded.

 

[Haljackey]

Yes, this will relieve pressure - for a few years. Then it will again be rammed due to induced demand and another round of widenings will be called for and so on and so on and so on.. The endless cycle of widenings and increased traffic congestion will follow the predictable path. We only have 70 years of evidence to go by. Maybe we need 100?

Too bad transit can't be expanded as quickly effortlessly as roads are expanded.

It's a growing city. Of course any new roads & widenings will get congested. Ideally road and transit projects should keep up with growth.

 

[W. K. Lis]

It's a growing city. Of course any new roads & widenings will get congested. Ideally road and transit projects should keep up with growth.

Widening and building new roads actually cause more congestion.

Expanding highways and building more roads actually makes traffic worse

More roads, more expenses, more congestion: a new report argues America’s transit policy gridlock is costing us billions of dollars

From link.

It’s a great time to be a road builder in the United States, and a terrible time to be a road user. If it feels like you’re perennially stuck in traffic due to road construction, you’re not wrong, and you’re not alone, according to a new report by Transportation for America.

The nation’s largest 100 urban areas added 30,511 new lane-miles of roads between 1993 and 2017, according to the report, a 42 percent increase (and a trend that shows no signs of slowing down). For perspective, that’s higher than population growth, which was 32 percent in those metros over the same time period. That’s not all that grew: traffic congestion, as measured in annual hours of delay, actually rose during those 24 years, by a staggering 144 percent.

The report, called The Congestion Con, explores the recent history of road-building in the United States, and argues that if anyone hopes this kind of massive infrastructure investments will help solve city conestion and traffic woes, this is far from being the case.

The report breaks down exactly why expanding roadways has been such a bad deal for the country. There’s the expense, for one. Each lane-mile of road costs between $4.2 and $15.4 million to build and an $24,000 a year to maintain. States alone spent $500 billion to expand roads between 1993 and 2017.

Second, it’s guaranteeing more of the same, in terms of roads, repair costs, pollution, and congestion. It’s the theory of induced demand: Building more roads and adding more lanes gives the appearance of speeding up traffic. But by encouraging sprawl, it spreads out stores, houses, and jobs, providing more reasons to drive more place and expanding many people’s commutes. It also adds more capacity, which is almost immediately filled up with more cars. Research by Kent Hymel of California State University of Northridge found that adding one percent more road capacity produces the exact same increase in the amount of vehicle miles traveled.

It seems logical that when populations grow, cities need to expand their transit networks. But comparing road building, congestion, and population growth statistics suggest that even when cities build roads at a faster clip than population growth, congestion still gets worse. During that same 1993 to 2017 period, San Diego roads expanded at about the same rate as population, yet the city still saw a 175 increase in congestion. And even in cities where roads were built much faster than new drivers arrived to fill them, congestion skyrocketed as well. In Pensacola, Florida, and Omaha, Nebraska—which both saw highways expand three times faster than population growth—congestion increased by 233 and 231 percent, respectively. In booming Boise, Idaho, roads expanded 141 percent while population grew 117 percent. But congestion increased 446 percent.

The increase in congestion on new, bigger roads is, in part, because it keeps people reliant on cars, as the report notes, “creating greater distances between housing and other destinations, and forcing people to take longer and longer trips on a handful of regional highways to fulfill daily needs.” The average driver puts in 4 more miles a day behind the wheel in 2017 than she did in 1993. Combine that with an affordable housing crisis and land-development patterns pushing more and more Americans to live further from downtowns and their jobs, and you have a formula for more crowded and congested roads.

The status quo, a treadmill of sinking money in roads only to see diminishing returns and more spending, looks even more irresponsible compared to a smarter, long-term regional investment in transit infrastructure. The Seattle metro area has embarked on an extensive plan to expand and invest in its light rail systems and bus network over the last decade, adopting initiatives like the Seattle Transportation Benefit District (STBD) funding scheme, and has seen promising results. The percentage of metro area trips taken on buses between 2010 and 2017 has increased from 42 percent to 58 percent, while trips in single-occupancy cars have declined from 35 to 25 percent. More buses and fewer solo commuters means fewer vehicles on the road. At the same time the city has been growing at a fast clip, adding 116,000 people between 2006 and 2019, car traffic has actually decreased, and mass transit ridership has shot up 89 percent.

It’s also been relatively cost-effective; for every dollar raised by STBD, $0.86 goes towards adding bus more bus trips. Seattle’s $54 billion Sound Transit 3 plan, a 25-year initiative which will levy increased sales, car, and property taxes over 25 years, is a lot of money. But when you compare it to the inefficiency of expanding roads and highways, and the added value of quicker and more accessible commutes, and the increase in value of transit-adjacent real estate, it looks like an smart investment.

Seattle isn’t perfect. And there’s much more it, and other cities, could do, as the report suggests: focus on mass transit efficiency (such as increasing the use of bus-only lanes and bus rapid transit) and routes that gets people to jobs and opportunity, redirect funding for new roads towards maintenance, increase walkability, focus on congestion pricing as a solution to traffic, and allow infill development and denser housing in cities.

But for the most part, transportation planners are sticking to the existing system. Houston is in the beginning stages of a $7 billion project to widen its I-45 freeway. Austin may see $4.3 billion spent on widening a highway that runs right through the center of town. Orlando is in the midst of its own $7 billion roadway spending spree, a plan to widen Interstate 4. A new 11-mile, four-lane highway project near Omaha, Nebraska, expected to cost $352 million, just broke ground.

Without fundamental changes to how we design our transit systems, we will just continue throwing good money after bad again, and expecting the results to be different. In Nebraska, road engineers predict that the hundreds of millions being spent on that strip of asphalt will result in just a 0.07 percent decrease in vehicle-miles traveled. That admission of the stalled status quo is almost as enraging as being stuck behind a semi truck during rush hour.

 

[Haljackey]

So let's take an extreme example then. Iet's say the 401 was left as a 4 lane highway like when it was first built. Would it still be able to carry the volume it does now? No. That traffic would have to go somewhere- it doesn't magically disappear. Yes some could be taken away by better transit but you'd run into severe congestion on the highway possibly stretching hundreds of KM. All the other roads in and outside Greater Toronto would also become clogged and the economy would grind to a halt, especially any kind of industry that relies on trucking.

Ideally, road and transit projects need to keep pace with growth. Induced demand is a thing so yes lesson learned when they jumped the 401 from 4 to 12 lanes. If you build it, they will come. It could have been expanded more slowly to keep up with demand but that may have been more costly in the long run. At least highways weren't built everywhere like in many US cities.

 

[sche]

So let's take an extreme example then. Iet's say the 401 was left as a 4 lane highway like when it was first built. Would it still be able to carry the volume it does now? No. That traffic would have to go somewhere- it doesn't magically disappear. Yes some could be taken away by better transit but you'd run into severe congestion on the highway possibly stretching hundreds of KM. All the other roads in and outside Greater Toronto would also become clogged and the economy would grind to a halt, especially any kind of industry that relies on trucking.

Ideally, road and transit projects need to keep pace with growth. Induced demand is a thing so yes lesson learned when they jumped the 401 from 4 to 12 lanes. If you build it, they will come. It could have been expanded more slowly to keep up with demand but that may have been more costly in the long run. At least highways weren't built everywhere like in many US cities.

Before I get into this, a bit about induced demand:
There are only two (major) things that will discourage someone from using a road: traffic and tolls. I will ignore tolls, since the 407 and 412 are the only toll roads in Ontario. If there happens to be no traffic on a non-tolled highway, people will move further away from their work, make more trips, etc. because there is now nothing to discourage them from using the highway. Developers will take advantage and build more subdivisions near the highway. As a result, the highway becomes congested because of its own existence. The highway will always be congested, as long as this highway is located in a successful major city. If the highway is widened and traffic reduced, the same thing I was talking about earlier happens again, and the highway becomes congested again. In a successful major city, demand for mobility is almost always much, much higher than supply. There is an enormous amount of latent demand. Thus, as soon as supply increases, the latent demand quickly comes to fill that newly created supply.

Now back to the 401 example:
If the 401 was never expanded past 4 lanes, yes there would be traffic. Yes, a 4 lane highway carries less cars than a 12 lane highway. But, if the highway was never expanded, the traffic would disappear (not magically). In fact, it would never exist in the first place. Just as induced demand is true (if you build it they will come), the inverse is equally true (if you don't build it, they won't come).

Think about why the 401, even though it is an enormous 12 lanes wide, is so full of traffic. Why are there so many cars?

The reason all 12 lanes are full of traffic today is because there are 12 lanes. If the 401 (and for that matter, any of the other highways in the GTA) was never expanded or built, we would never see the vast expanses of car-centric suburbia funnelling traffic onto our roads. We would not see people living 30+ km from work and thus having to drive that far. The entire built form of the GTA would be different to reflect the fact that there is less highway capacity

Road projects can (almost) never keep up with growth in a successful large city. Growth (in traffic) increases because of road projects. Roads can't be expanded indefinitely due to space and money constraints.

Now, what about transit?
Transit projects face induced demand too. Part of the reason the Yonge line is overcrowded is also due to its own existence - for example, all of the development along the Yonge corridor and the people that make travelling decisions due to the existence of the Yonge line. In big transit-centric cities like Tokyo or London or Paris, the system is always overcrowded, even after huge expansions.

However, there is a very important difference between transit and roads: transit is much more efficient. I mentioned earlier that the constraints on road-building are space and money. Transit building faces the same constraints. However, assuming both the roads and transit are equally intelligently planned, roads require far more money and far more space than transit to carry the same number of people. A transit vehicle simply moves more people in a smaller space. Transit can be built in far more different corridors than roads because it is much cheaper and easier to build underground or elevated transit when compared to underground or elevated roads, so far more transit lines are built. For example, the Bloor-Danforth line takes up much less ROW and carries something like 4-5x more riders than the DVP despite only being about 2x longer. As another example, a mid-sized car-centric city like Indianapolis has traffic issues (looking up "Indianapolis traffic congestion" yields many results), but similarly sized transit-oriented cities like Marseille do not have similarly bad transit overcrowding issues (looking up "Marseille metro overcrowding" doesn't yield anything relevant). Although not a perfect comparison, this shows that with similar resources and population, transit investment goes further in moving people.

I didn't really know where to add this so this will be at the end, but transit also has another huge advantage - when road users increase, very quickly everyone's journeys get much slower due to traffic. But, with transit, as ridership increases, riders may be less comfortable, but speed does not decrease nearly as much.

Note: Self driving cars and increasing road efficiency
Self-driving car stuff seems to be popping up on other threads here. It is true that the widespread adoption of self-driving cars will dramatically increase road capacity by increasing efficiency. However, this increase in capacity is not fundamentally different from the increase in capacity from widening roads. Induced demand does not change. And, the core problem of cars taking up more space than transit and thus costing more remains the same - transit infrastructure will still be more efficient than roads for self driving cars.

Apologies for the long post!

 

[TRONto]

Widening and building new roads actually cause more congestion.

Expanding highways and building more roads actually makes traffic worse

More roads, more expenses, more congestion: a new report argues America’s transit policy gridlock is costing us billions of dollars

From link.

The author of the article doesn't understand that while road volume and population are linear, congestion works on an exponential curve. That means that road volume would has to dramatically increase relative to population increases to allow for a constant level of congestion. Read the article again with that lens and you'll see it pop out.

 

[TRONto]

Before I get into this, a bit about induced demand:
There are only two (major) things that will discourage someone from using a road: traffic and tolls. I will ignore tolls, since the 407 and 412 are the only toll roads in Ontario. If there happens to be no traffic on a non-tolled highway, people will move further away from their work, make more trips, etc. because there is now nothing to discourage them from using the highway. Developers will take advantage and build more subdivisions near the highway. As a result, the highway becomes congested because of its own existence. The highway will always be congested, as long as this highway is located in a successful major city. If the highway is widened and traffic reduced, the same thing I was talking about earlier happens again, and the highway becomes congested again. In a successful major city, demand for mobility is almost always much, much higher than supply. There is an enormous amount of latent demand. Thus, as soon as supply increases, the latent demand quickly comes to fill that newly created supply.

Now back to the 401 example:
If the 401 was never expanded past 4 lanes, yes there would be traffic. Yes, a 4 lane highway carries less cars than a 12 lane highway. But, if the highway was never expanded, the traffic would disappear (not magically). In fact, it would never exist in the first place. Just as induced demand is true (if you build it they will come), the inverse is equally true (if you don't build it, they won't come).

Think about why the 401, even though it is an enormous 12 lanes wide, is so full of traffic. Why are there so many cars?

The reason all 12 lanes are full of traffic today is because there are 12 lanes. If the 401 (and for that matter, any of the other highways in the GTA) was never expanded or built, we would never see the vast expanses of car-centric suburbia funnelling traffic onto our roads. We would not see people living 30+ km from work and thus having to drive that far. The entire built form of the GTA would be different to reflect the fact that there is less highway capacity

Road projects can (almost) never keep up with growth in a successful large city. Growth (in traffic) increases because of road projects. Roads can't be expanded indefinitely due to space and money constraints.

Now, what about transit?
Transit projects face induced demand too. Part of the reason the Yonge line is overcrowded is also due to its own existence - for example, all of the development along the Yonge corridor and the people that make travelling decisions due to the existence of the Yonge line. In big transit-centric cities like Tokyo or London or Paris, the system is always overcrowded, even after huge expansions.

However, there is a very important difference between transit and roads: transit is much more efficient. I mentioned earlier that the constraints on road-building are space and money. Transit building faces the same constraints. However, assuming both the roads and transit are equally intelligently planned, roads require far more money and far more space than transit to carry the same number of people. A transit vehicle simply moves more people in a smaller space. Transit can be built in far more different corridors than roads because it is much cheaper and easier to build underground or elevated transit when compared to underground or elevated roads, so far more transit lines are built. For example, the Bloor-Danforth line takes up much less ROW and carries something like 4-5x more riders than the DVP despite only being about 2x longer. As another example, a mid-sized car-centric city like Indianapolis has traffic issues (looking up "Indianapolis traffic congestion" yields many results), but similarly sized transit-oriented cities like Marseille do not have similarly bad transit overcrowding issues (looking up "Marseille metro overcrowding" doesn't yield anything relevant). Although not a perfect comparison, this shows that with similar resources and population, transit investment goes further in moving people.

I didn't really know where to add this so this will be at the end, but transit also has another huge advantage - when road users increase, very quickly everyone's journeys get much slower due to traffic. But, with transit, as ridership increases, riders may be less comfortable, but speed does not decrease nearly as much.

Note: Self driving cars and increasing road efficiency
Self-driving car stuff seems to be popping up on other threads here. It is true that the widespread adoption of self-driving cars will dramatically increase road capacity by increasing efficiency. However, this increase in capacity is not fundamentally different from the increase in capacity from widening roads. Induced demand does not change. And, the core problem of cars taking up more space than transit and thus costing more remains the same - transit infrastructure will still be more efficient than roads for self driving cars.

Apologies for the long post!

Just got off the 401 a couple of hours ago and what is frequently not mentioned is that a good % of the vehicle volumes are trucks. Transit doesn't help with trucks.

The underlying mechanism is the design of cities. The GTA is car-centric and the current zoning are set to continue the car-centric design. You are right in what you have stated but to fix the situation would require undemocratic level of bulldozing cities. With our current situation, what do we do? I am completely for a more open zoning, building much more rapid transit and TOD but even those changes wouldn't be enough.

 

[sche]

Just got off the 401 a couple of hours ago and what is frequently not mentioned is that a good % of the vehicle volumes are trucks. Transit doesn't help with trucks.

The underlying mechanism is the design of cities. The GTA is car-centric and the current zoning are set to continue the car-centric design. You are right in what you have stated but to fix the situation would require undemocratic level of bulldozing cities. With our current situation, what do we do? I am completely for a more open zoning, building much more rapid transit and TOD but even those changes wouldn't be enough.

Not much we can do now, but point was just that the world wouldn’t have ended if the 401 was never built and we should stop wasting money on road expansions that don’t fix any problems.