By LARRY CORNIES of the London Free Press
Highway 401 Widening complete between Woodstock and K-W (6 lanes from 402 to 410)
A very interesting read. I've always hated traveling on the 401 between Woodstock and K-W. With the new 6-lane facility now open with a concrete median, it should be a more pleasurable drive for motorists (although still quite boring).
Link:
http://www.lfpress.com/comment/2010/12/03/16421491.html
Construction zone along Highway 401 in May 2010
WOODSTOCK - Over the past four weeks, they've gradually disappeared: the dump trucks, graders, pavers and stripers. Except for a few crowning touches that will wait until spring, the massive construction project on a 20-kilometre stretch of Hwy. 401 just east of Woodstock is finally finished.
The initiative has taken more than two years and cost millions. But like a giant angioplasty, it has opened the thoroughfare to at least three lanes in each direction along a continuous stretch from the terminus of Hwy. 402 in south London to just east of Toronto.
Completion of the road widening and its now-continuous concrete barrier is a welcome relief to anyone who must travel that stretch frequently. The 401, which on a typical weekday resembles a fast-moving warehouse more than an auto route, is a freeway in constant search of its own limits.
Occasionally, those limits become all too apparent. Such was the case in the early 1990s. As just-in-time delivery became standard practice in the manufacturing and logistics industries, traffic on the highway, especially trucks lugging 53-foot trailers, grew at an astonishing rate.
Those dramatic increases in traffic flow combined with the highway's narrow, open medians to produce a death toll that was nearly unprecedented. Median crossovers were a particular problem and caused dozens of deaths, especially in the stretch between Woodstock and London. Newspaper editorials and letter writers railed against the increasingly dangerous conditions. The province accelerated its improvement plans.
As the scope of the problem became increasingly clear, the province's Transportation Ministry installed rumble strips and erected a permanent concrete barrier along the especially troublesome section, where the grassy median in some places was as narrow as nine metres.
On the newly completed section, the median (already 15 metres wide) wasn't so much the problem as was capacity, according to Michael Swim, an engineer in the Ministry of Transportation's highway planning and design team for West Region. Spurred by industrial growth along the 401 corridor in Oxford and Middlesex counties, the freeway was dealing with "capacity issues" that required additional lanes to reduce "rear-enders and sideswipes," he says.
There are limits, however, to what engineers can do to protect us from ourselves.
As a piece of utilitarian infrastructure, Hwy. 401 works well. The most significant remaining variable in the complex mathematical formula that defines motoring safety on the country's busiest thoroughfare is speed. In short, we're addicted to it.
Never mind the hand-held talkers and texters, who appear unfazed by recent regulations to stem their distraction. Forget the measures intended to impose a maximum speed on trucks at 105 km/h through the use of limiters. It's still the issue of speed, often combined with aggressive driving, that's the major danger out there.
The problem of speed is, in fact, two-fold. First, the posted 100-km/h limit has been rendered meaningless. Observe that limit strictly, even in the right-hand lane, and you become a moving hazard. Even police vehicles on routine business far exceed the posted limit, which seems to serve only the purpose of increasing fines and demerit-point losses when speeders are tagged with going, say, 130 km/h - which may be 30 over the limit but only 10 or 15 above the rate at which traffic is actually moving.
The second aspect of the speed problem is uniformity of movement. On the wildest of days, there can be a 40-km/h (or more) differential between the slowest and fastest motorists on the highway. That disparity leads to aggressive driving and lane changes that wouldn't occur if everyone observed more uniform speeds.
What enforcement of speed limits does exist appears to be checkered: Along the Windsor-Toronto corridor, speed traps are more common in Waterloo Region, Oxford County and Chatham-Kent, for example, than in Essex, Elgin and Middlesex counties.
To mangle some Shakespeare: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the highway, but in ourselves. While roadway engineers continue to deal with the daunting problem of keeping up with capacity, the biggest remaining step we can take to make the 401 a less intimidating beast would be to address the speed issue unambiguously.
That means a maximum speed of 110 and zero tolerance for those who exceed it. Many U.S. states apply the zero-tolerance rule; there's no reason we can't.
Those measures would accomplish at least as much as the perennial reconstruction we're tempted to believe is the ultimate answer.
