Ontario Premier Doug Ford plans to focus on Toronto’s grinding gridlock in a round of upcoming legislation that promises to be “game-changing” for drivers.
Speaking at the Toronto Region Board of Trade, the premier said he was planning to bring big changes to two particular routes, the Gardiner Expressway and Highway 401.
“We have some other great ideas, some really, really game-changing things that we’re going to do in transportation,” Ford said.
He also told Global News the plans were focused specifically on tackling congestion on Highway 401 and the Gardiner Expressway.
The latter was handed to the provincial government by the City of Toronto in a recent new deal and is in the midst of a years-long rehabilitation project, which has slowed already congested traffic to a crawl.
During the spring, the transportation minister suggested construction on the Gardiner Expressway should take place 24 hours a day to speed up the project. That sparked weeks of debate about whether that was already happening and what was actually possible for the route.
What the government plans to do going forward to ease congestion on Highway 401 and the Gardiner Expressway is not yet clear.
Expanding the footprint of the roads to add more lanes could be complicated. Both routes run through heavily populated parts of Toronto, without land available on either side in most places to expand the asphalt.
In bygone years, when he was a city councillor, Ford pitched creative ways to make the roads bigger but not wider.
In 2012, he mused about tunnelling below the Gardiner or adding extra layers above the city’s roads.
“I’m in favour of exploring: what is the cost of tunnelling, what is the cost of putting a double-decker, a triple-decker like they have in New York?” Ford said at the time, according to the National Post.
“Let’s find out the cost.”
Those design changes are possible in engineering terms — according to one expert — but could be prohibitively expensive.
“In a lot of Asia, they’re doing decking projects. India is doing a lot of decking. They call them flyovers,” said Matti Siemiatycki, professor of geography and director of the University of Toronto’s Infrastructure Institute.
“The reality is that the cost of both of those initiatives is astronomical,” he said.
“What will happen is a pattern called induced demand where ultimately, over time, you’ll end up with those additional lanes also becoming congested.”
The Ford government has tended to favour adding more lanes to roads or building new routes altogether to respond to congestion. It has prioritized constructing a new Milton to Vaughan route called Highway 413 and a Simcoe project, the Bradford Bypass.
Opposition critics, however, have repeatedly pushed the option of subsidizing the cost of trucks on the tolled Highway 407 as an alternative. The Ontario NDP brought the idea to the legislature earlier in the year, with a motion the government voted down.
Ontario Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner told Global News that paying to move trucks off Highway 401, in particular, onto Highway 407 would cost less than new infrastructure and deliver the results the government wanted sooner.
“It’s more fiscally, environmentally responsible to pay the tolls of truckers than building new highways,” he said.
“And we can end gridlock now — not decades into the future.”