Less than three months after removing tolls from the publicly-owned portion of Highway 407, Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he is considering expanding the now-clogged artery.
At an unrelated event in Pickering, Ont., on Thursday, Ford said he was receiving a growing number of calls from frustrated drivers who had hopped onto the toll-free 407 east, only to find themselves stuck in gridlock.
“People are coming home from the cottage; it’s getting pretty jammed up on there,” Ford said. “But if it’s jammed up there, I always say it must be taking congestion off another part, I guess the 401.”
Ford’s concerns about congestion came 10 weeks after his government removed tolls from the public portion of the 407, a move it promised would save drivers money and time.
A news release promoting toll removal — which officially happened on June 1 — said getting rid of 407 tolls would “help lower costs and fight gridlock.”
Weeks after that promise was made, however, Ford said he was considering expanding the route.
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“So I think in the long term, we might have to look at — we’ll work with the Ministry of Transportation and obviously the person that controls the money, Minister (Peter) Bethlenfalvy, to see if we can maybe add lanes on either side,” he said.
“So we’re looking at a plan to lighten up the traffic.”
Ontario Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner said the rapid speed at which Highway 407 east became congested proves the policy Ford wants to pursue won’t work.
“When you build new highways or expand existing highways or remove road pricing from existing highways, it encourages more people to drive — it just leads to more gridlock,” he explained.
“That’s exactly why this ridiculous idea of the tunnel under the 401 or building Highway 413 and paving over 2,000 acres of farmland, 400 acres of the Greenbelt, is not going to solve gridlock.”
Over the past decade, Ontario has added a total of 134 km of new lanes to Highway 401 across the province. Despite the massive expansion, the crippling bottleneck at the centre of the highway worsened.
Schreiner said he wasn’t sure Ford understood induced demand — the phenomenon where adding more roads encourages driving and therefore congestion.
“Not even for the premier, but for a lot of people, it just seems intuitive that if you build more highways, expand existing highways that that’s going to solve gridlock,” he said.
“The reality is, it just creates an incentive for more people to drive and leads to more gridlock.”
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