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Roads: GTA West Corridor—Highway 413

north-of-anything said:
Why is this development occurring in Cambridge and Bradford a bad thing again? These "further afield" settlements also need employment so people can work closer to home, and the infrastructure also may either already exist (Cambridge) or be planned to accommodate future intensification of existing residential zones (Bradford). The only place this is true in the GTA West Corridor is Bolton.

Instead of trying to force more industrial development around the fringes of the Greenbelt, we ought to see how we can better use existing land. (Maybe 60-year-old office buildings with sprawling parking lots isn't the best thing to have right next to the 404...)
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Because those trucks now drive from Cambridge to Toronto to do deliveries instead of Vaughan to Toronto.

All it's doing is shifting the industrial uses from Vaughan to Cambridge, where it's further from customers and where it has a morel limited pool of employees.

All it's doing is pushing development further out, increasing transportation costs and emissions.

The answer to the issue of environmental protection is not in infrastructure - it's in land use. To reduce impacts you need to look at how to increase the compactness of commercial development. Amazon is building a 5 million square foot, 5 storey industrial warehouse in Ottawa right now for example - that's far more land efficient than what is industry standard. Trying to limit sprawl by not providing the infrastructure is not going to work, it's just going to push demand where it is permitted. you have to fix the land use permissions and demands.

The issue too is that Toronto has some of the highest growth pressures in the western world. Looking at cities in Europe with marginal population growth is not as easy of a comparison - the demand for space is just nowhere close to Toronto. A city that adds 100k+ people a year is naturally going to need more land - you have to try to minimize that need, but you aren't rationally going to get around that need. And you have to plan properly for that need, including properly servicing it with infrastructure.
 
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I will say reading through everyone recent points that I understand why people are opposed to sprawl and their aspirations with intensifying growth within existing built up areas - however the current planning framework for the region doesn't align with that approach. The current plans stipulate that there will be development 100'000s of people and jobs in the whitebelt along the proposed highway route. I think there is healthy discussion on the merits for the highway if those lands are built in a dense transit oriented form, but unless the province and GTA municipalities make a major policy shift to open up the vast majority of existing neighbourhoods for infill development there is going to be a continued demand for these lands to satisfy growth. Is Toronto ready to open up the yellowbelt to allow for this? We cannot continue to do major development solely on existing employment lands - this is noted in the province's move to protect employment lands recently and in the discussion above about existing supply constraints.

Are the political mechanisms in the province capable (or willing) to even take a step back and evaluate the highway on these merits. We can't fight against the development of this area without simultaneously making huge changes to our infill policies and I don't know if anyone is actively pushing for that?
 
There are too many moving parts and plans all at play to actively prevent sprawl from happening in these areas - Brampton, Caledon, Halton, and Vaughan all intend on developing these lands, with or without the 413. Expecting these regions to fully cooperate in a regional approach that would redirect potential residents from their whitebelt regions to others like Toronto and Mississauga is just unrealistic - as it would not be within their best interests. There should be more focus on ensuring proper land use and denser, transit-oriented-development along the 413 is followed, as opposed to just preventing it altogether. Once these regions are packed with residents and industrial development in 30 years, a highway will be essential, like it or not. I'd personally rather have it built now while the land is empty and cheap and land use can be appropriately planned around the highway, as opposed to being much more expensive later on and potentially having to go fully through the greenbelt, causing more impact to the environment and emerging justification for the removal of protections.
 
innsertnamehere said:
Because those trucks now drive from Cambridge to Toronto to do deliveries instead of Vaughan to Toronto.

All it's doing is shifting the industrial uses from Vaughan to Cambridge, where it's further from customers and where it has a morel limited pool of employees.

All it's doing is pushing development further out, increasing transportation costs and emissions.

The answer to the issue of environmental protection is not in infrastructure - it's in land use. To reduce impacts you need to look at how to increase the compactness of commercial development. Amazon is building a 5 million square foot, 5 storey industrial warehouse in Ottawa right now for example - that's far more land efficient than what is industry standard. Trying to limit sprawl by not providing the infrastructure is not going to work, it's just going to push demand where it is permitted. you have to fix the land use permissions and demands.

The issue too is that Toronto has some of the highest growth pressures in the western world. Looking at cities in Europe with marginal population growth is not as easy of a comparison - the demand for space is just nowhere close to Toronto. A city that adds 100k+ people a year is naturally going to need more land - you have to try to minimize that need, but you aren't rationally going to get around that need. And you have to plan properly for that need, including properly servicing it with infrastructure.
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There's lots of yellow belt land available within Toronto ;)
 
ericmacm said:
There should be more focus on ensuring proper land use and denser, transit-oriented-development along the 413 is followed, as opposed to just preventing it altogether.
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Yeah - I don’t buy this.

We can’t simultaneously say that “the current planning regime encourages sprawl” and then imagine that the land around the 413 isn’t going to follow this pattern. There’s absolutely no proof that somehow, bucking decades of low-density development in that area, we’re going to build dense spaces next to a highway.
 
afransen said:
The whole cycle of delivering windfall profits to developers stinks and is a breeding ground for corruption.
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"The whole cycle of delivering housing in a housing shortage stinks"

Too often developers are made out to be evil - they are just delivering a product like every other company.

Also, this highway isn't really going to deliver windfall profits. These lands are all zoned for development regardless - developers are going to build no matter what. They don't care if buyers have to drive through traffic or not.

The windfall for developers comes when they get development permissions, not when a highway is built nearby. MZOs have been windfalls for developers, as they give them development permissions right away without appeal and often allow them to skip years of planning. Makes them very, very rich. A highway? Not so much. Developers actually dislike the project as it takes development land away from them, if anything, and has delayed development in this area by a decade now as it froze development along the corridor while MTO determined the preferred alignment.
 
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ericmacm said:
There are too many moving parts and plans all at play to actively prevent sprawl from happening in these areas - Brampton, Caledon, Halton, and Vaughan all intend on developing these lands, with or without the 413. Expecting these regions to fully cooperate in a regional approach that would redirect potential residents from their whitebelt regions to others like Toronto and Mississauga is just unrealistic - as it would not be within their best interests. There should be more focus on ensuring proper land use and denser, transit-oriented-development along the 413 is followed, as opposed to just preventing it altogether. Once these regions are packed with residents and industrial development in 30 years, a highway will be essential, like it or not. I'd personally rather have it built now while the land is empty and cheap and land use can be appropriately planned around the highway, as opposed to being much more expensive later on and potentially having to go fully through the greenbelt, causing more impact to the environment and emerging justification for the removal of protections.
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I'm unclear on why you feel that change can't be imposed.

The Greenbelt was imposed.

Places to Grow was imposed.

The Province is perfectly capable of legislating what it wants and what it does not want.

Whitebelt lands can be downzoned; and growth directed to the yellowbelt.

While the latter continues to happen too slowly, lets allow that the TOD (transit-oriented-development) mandate from the province is likely a game changer in a big chunk of the yellowbelt.

It hasn't been fully tested yet; but if everything within a few hundred metres of a GO Station, a Subway Station, and LRT route or a BRT route is mandated for growth, we will see lots of it, in many yellow-belt areas.

We need to expand on that, codify it, make it more well thought out and then easier to do.

But its certainly achievable.

With growth in the right places, there's no need to abide it in the wrong ones.

The 905 can still grow; just on already developed lands.
 
Woodbridge_Heights said:
Unless and until we see an RER styled system with GO stations every ~2-4 Km in the urbanized area of the GTA I will continue to find it difficult to rationalize any new highway development.
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At the very least, we should have a plan to serve all greenfield areas with RER style service, with density to support. With the same or greater commitment as highway expansion.
 
Woodbridge_Heights said:
Unless and until we see an RER styled system with GO stations every ~2-4 Km in the urbanized area of the GTA I will continue to find it difficult to rationalize any new highway development.
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Id honestly prefer the money to be spent buying back the 407 and tolling it at reasonable rate like $1 every 30km than build a new highway.
 
robmausser said:
Id honestly prefer the money to be spent buying back the 407 and tolling it at reasonable rate like $1 every 30km than build a new highway.
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Never gonna happen. 3 cents a km is way too low. It would be instantly jammed. The peak rate should be around where it is now (maybe a bit lower), but more like 5-10 cents off-peak.
 
afransen said:
Never gonna happen. 3 cents a km is way too low. It would be instantly jammed. The peak rate should be around where it is now (maybe a bit lower), but more like 5-10 cents off-peak.
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The 407 east charges $0.29/km at peak rates and $0.19/km off peak rates, which is a bit high for my tastes but fairly reasonable. I use the 412 every couple of months, regardless of traffic conditions as it's significantly faster than Lakeridge to get up to Highway 7, and costs only like $2 to use.

GTA West is a fairly long distance highway, so I would like to see peak rates around $0.20/km with off peak rates more in the $0.10/km range. It certainly wouldn't be higher than 407 East. $0.29/km would result in a peak charge of about $15 to travel the entire highway, or $0.20/km would be about $10.

$0.03/km would be like $1.50 to travel the whole highway.. which is just stupidly cheap. It probably wouldn't even pay for the cost of maintaining the toll infrastructure, especially considering most drivers won't be driving anywhere close to the whole 50km.

A key thing would be to make sure that commercial vehicles aren't charged much to use it. Right now the 407 gouges commercial vehicles which keeps them off the highway.
 
innsertnamehere said:
$0.03/km would be like $1.50 to travel the whole highway.. which is just stupidly cheap. It probably wouldn't even pay for the cost of maintaining the toll infrastructure, especially considering most drivers won't be driving anywhere close to the whole 50km.
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I guess im just used to toll roads in New York which are about this price.
 
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