Roads: Ontario/GTA Highways Discussion

[Civdis]

Well there's a lot of evidence why a transit line is a much better option than another highway in Toronto's current content. All of that has been shared in these forums for years. It's not really a matter of opinion at this point.

As a civil engineer with a lot of knowledge and experience in this area, I can tell you that is still very much a matter of opinion. It isn't just cars that use our highways. We need to move goods and services, as well as allow people to get to places that cannot be economically served by transit. That is why I prefer a two pronged solution. We need both a good highway network AND a good transit network. If you have a good infrastructure corridor staring you in the face, why not maximize its capacity in a multi-modal way? Like I said, it doesn't have to be "either or", it can be both.

 

[Undead]

We can put people on transit and keep goods/trucks on the roads. Yes, not everyone's job allows them to take a train or bus. But for many, public transit is viable.

Another huge factor that no one wants to discuss is allow as much remote work as possible for those whose job can be done remotely. And there's a boat load of people with jobs like that. As covid demonstrated, we can easily solve congestion this way without adding a single lane or new transit line.

 

[lenaitch]

A lot wrong here.

1. An 8-lane highway has about a 50 metre cross section, and can go narrower if you are willing to sacrifice shoulder width. I-90 in Boston fits 8 lanes of freeway traffic in a ~32 metre wide trench. There should theoretically be lots of options to realign and consolidate hydro towers to accommodate that, with enough money involved.

2. I've said this multiple times on this board - Sydney, NSW has recently opened a ~22km, 6-8 lane tunneled expressway and is expanding it to a network of over 40km of tunneled expressway. The 401 Tunnel is undoubtedly.. ambitious. It's almost certainly a waste of money (especially if it ends up as a 55km tunnel), but it''s not a "Springfield type monorail". There is global precedent. Expressway tunnels would also probably be dug with Sequential Excavation, like how Sydney and the Ottawa LRT was completed, which allows wider tunnel shapes to accommodate multiple vehicle lanes.

I think we should wait and see what is actually proposed before passing judgement.. If it's as absurd as people are making it out to be, sure, we can issue that judgement at that time. But let's see how creative MTO can get.

I suspect, like many stretches of the 401 through Toronto, I-90 has expanded into the space available, but I doubt no shoulders is an acceptable 'greenfield' design standard.

I'm not sure what you mean by "consolidate" electric pylons. They could increase the capacity of each circuit ($$$$$) but higher power requires greater clearances. The other alternative would be to bury them. There is still the issue of pipelines. I used to know how many but don't know the footprint.

Perhaps you are right about the burying a 401 tunnel. It would be interesting to see their emergency plans and workplace standards. I'm not wholly familiar with modern construction techniques but, short of boring, I fail to see how any kind of significant disruption of sections of the 401 would be feasible. Regardless, even if it goes ahead, I likely won't live to see it.

 

[junctionist]

As a civil engineer with a lot of knowledge and experience in this area, I can tell you that is still very much a matter of opinion. It isn't just cars that use our highways. We need to move goods and services, as well as allow people to get to places that cannot be economically served by transit. That is why I prefer a two pronged solution. We need both a good highway network AND a good transit network. If you have a good infrastructure corridor staring you in the face, why not maximize its capacity in a multi-modal way? Like I said, it doesn't have to be "either or", it can be both.

Don't we also need more freight railways to move freight off of the roads in order to address congestion and sprawl? In the past, freight railways were everywhere there were jobs. Every manufacturing and warehousing area had freight connections. The offices in the Financial District got their mail, trade goods, furniture, and telegrams by freight railways converging near Front Street.

It seems that moving things by truck socializes a lot of the costs of logistics and requires massive government subsidies. These trucks pollute, create congestion, destroy our roads, and leave drivers with bad backs from decades of vibration and, sadly, cancer from diesel and exhaust exposure.

Another issue to consider is that transit often doesn't work well next to a highway. Highways often don't have much population density around them. They don't tend to foster the development of the kind of dense pedestrian-oriented urban fabric that generates a lot of transit ridership. The stations on Line 1 in the middle of Allen Road, an expressway, tend to have lower ridership than the portion of the line built under Yonge Street.

 

[Bojaxs]

Mileage Mike released a video about the 401. He's a Youtuber who talks regularly about American highways. He's seem like an all around nice guy, but unfortunately holds some opinions that would be deemed less than favourable by this forum. I believe he worked for the department of Transportation or did some kind of highway planning in the states.
It was entertaining to listen to an American's take on highway 401 and Canadian cities.

 

[lenaitch]

Don't we also need more freight railways to move freight off of the roads in order to address congestion and sprawl? In the past, freight railways were everywhere there were jobs. Every manufacturing and warehousing area had freight connections. The offices in the Financial District got their mail, trade goods, furniture, and telegrams by freight railways converging near Front Street.

It seems that moving things by truck socializes a lot of the costs of logistics and requires massive government subsidies. These trucks pollute, create congestion, destroy our roads, and leave drivers with bad backs from decades of vibration and, sadly, cancer from diesel and exhaust exposure.

Another issue to consider is that transit often doesn't work well next to a highway. Highways often don't have much population density around them. They don't tend to foster the development of the kind of dense pedestrian-oriented urban fabric that generates a lot of transit ridership. The stations on Line 1 in the middle of Allen Road, an expressway, tend to have lower ridership than the portion of the line built under Yonge Street.

The main reason businesses stopped using rail was that trucking was cheaper and more flexible (the other is we have a lot less manufacturing that we used to). Unless you are a high volume bulk producer, or require bulk inputs, a business can fill a truck today and it can be in Montreal tomorrow morning, where a freight car would sit for a few days waiting to be picked up. You don't have to assemble a truck into a fleet of trucks. Just-in-time supply chain management has been perfected by the auto manufacturing industry but is used by a lot of others. Why build a big warehouse to store a train load of parts that arrives once a week when you can take regular delivery of smaller truckloads of part that are turned into your final product within hours.

It does, in a sense, 'socialize' goods movement but that's not likely to go away anytime soon.

 

[Haljackey]

Mileage Mike released a video about the 401. He's a Youtuber who talks regularly about American highways. He's seem like an all around nice guy, but unfortunately holds some opinions that would be deemed less than favourable by this forum. I believe he worked for the department of Transportation so did some kind of highway planning in the states.
It was entertaining to listen to an American's take on highway 401 and Canadian cities.

Interesting idea about swapping tolls, making the 407 free but the 401 tolled. 407 would need to be beefed up considerably for that to happen, and for the 401 maybe just the express would be tolled similar to HOT lanes since it's already so beefy.

 

[rbt]

Mileage Mike released a video about the 401. He's a Youtuber who talks regularly about American highways. He's seem like an all around nice guy, but unfortunately holds some opinions that would be deemed less than favourable by this forum. I believe he worked for the department of Transportation or did some kind of highway planning in the states.
It was entertaining to listen to an American's take on highway 401 and Canadian cities.

Points for showing the complete route but they did a poor job of demonstrating the title of the video: just how busy the busy section is. The video would have benefited from footage taken from overpasses of the 18+ lane sections, and a few throughput statistics for those sections as compared to the other busy highways in North America.

 

[Steve X]

The 401 has just too many bottlenecks, especially in the collectors. Half of the reason why it's so jammed up is cause traffic always need to shift to another lane to continue to forward. Tolling the express would be terrible for trucks as they want to avoid changing lanes with everyone blocking them.

 

[ShonTron]

The 401 has just too many bottlenecks, especially in the collectors. Half of the reason why it's so jammed up is cause traffic always need to shift to another lane to continue to forward. Tolling the express would be terrible for trucks as they want to avoid changing lanes with everyone blocking them.

Going eastbound at Keele/Dufferin/Allen and at Kennedy in the collectors are the two worst places in my experience. Westbound, it’s at Yonge Street and at Allen/Yorkdale.

 

[afransen]

The 401 has just too many bottlenecks, especially in the collectors. Half of the reason why it's so jammed up is cause traffic always need to shift to another lane to continue to forward. Tolling the express would be terrible for trucks as they want to avoid changing lanes with everyone blocking them.

The thing with bottlenecks is that you can't eliminate them, just move them somewhere else.

 

[ShonTron]

The thing with bottlenecks is that you can't eliminate them, just move them somewhere else.

There are examples of poor design causing unnecessary problems, though. The eastbound 401 at Kennedy has the express lanes merging in, with very little room to get over to the Kennedy off-ramp. Traffic entering from Warden has to move over two lanes to the left to merge in and then not be stuck in the Kennedy exit.

 

[6ixGod]

Mileage Mike released a video about the 401. He's a Youtuber who talks regularly about American highways. He's seem like an all around nice guy, but unfortunately holds some opinions that would be deemed less than favourable by this forum. I believe he worked for the department of Transportation or did some kind of highway planning in the states.
It was entertaining to listen to an American's take on highway 401 and Canadian cities.

Ah you beat me to it, was just going to share this video.

Although based on his recent videos, he is very anti bike lane and supported Ford’s decision to remove bike lanes in Toronto. He got cooked in the comments section though (and rightfully so), but he seems to be part of the “just one more lane” group.

Interesting how he said they should toll the 401through Toronto and make the 407 free…it would never work though, but I understood where he was coming from.

I hope Ontario can get control back of the 407….it won’t solve the problems on the 401, but I could see a huge shift of 18 wheelers moving off the 401 and onto the 407.

 

[Steve X]

The thing with bottlenecks is that you can't eliminate them, just move them somewhere else.

They can be smoothen out with better lane management. Yes that means a new lane of space might be needed but this new spaces is to allow cars to stay in the same lane instead of having everyone shift a lane. It will also reduce collision too.

Eastbound Kennedy is the worse. Everyone needs to get out of the right lane if they don’t want to get off at Kennedy. With the express traffic fighting through too, everyone needs to slow down as there’s too much shuffling.

Eastbound DVP/404 to Vic Park needs all cars to quickly shift to another lane if they don’t want to get off at VP. All the cars and especially all the slow ones love to hog the left lane to avoid all the traffic getting into the DVP/404. This basically creates a backup from Bayview onwards with all this traffic and express crossover before Leslie.

Eastbound at the split at Kipling really needs an extra lane in the collector and express to smoothen out the 409 traffic and better flowing ramps to the 400. This would be a hard one to fix.

Westbound at Yonge needs an extra lane which is also costly as they need to widen the Hogg’s Hollow Bridge

 

[Woodbridge_Heights]

The main reason businesses stopped using rail was that trucking was cheaper and more flexible (the other is we have a lot less manufacturing that we used to). Unless you are a high volume bulk producer, or require bulk inputs, a business can fill a truck today and it can be in Montreal tomorrow morning, where a freight car would sit for a few days waiting to be picked up. You don't have to assemble a truck into a fleet of trucks. Just-in-time supply chain management has been perfected by the auto manufacturing industry but is used by a lot of others. Why build a big warehouse to store a train load of parts that arrives once a week when you can take regular delivery of smaller truckloads of part that are turned into your final product within hours.

It does, in a sense, 'socialize' goods movement but that's not likely to go away anytime soon.

Why spend money to build railways to run your trains on when you can just run your trucks on public roadways?

***EDIT***

There's also the tendency of the freight railways to favour longer less frequent trainsets over smaller more frequent ones. Sure for large bulk goods transport halfway across the country time isn't a huge factor so it makes sense to have multi km long, multi loco driven trainsets. But for freight trips between Toronto and Montreal, shorter more frequent trains make more sense, and of course this requires more tracks though.

The "Well There's Your Problem Podcast" did a few episodes on freight railways and how decisions made by corp executives affected the viability of freight rail. It's been a while since I've watched them, but there were these two episodes: