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Roads: Ontario/GTA Highways Discussion

turbanplanner said:
Doubt it tbh, the biggest cause of traffic eastbound IMO is that when you closed the lakeshore off ramp everyone HAS to get off at jarvis. You have the entire right lane blocked with people entering/exiting the highway, additionally some people in the left lane stay there until the last second and slam on the brakes.
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I took the Gardiner to and from Hamilton today. It wasn’t that bad. My way out at 8:30 am was Bayview to DVP south, Gardiner to Yonge, Lakeshore to Gardiner, QEW to 403. At 2pm it was 403, QEW, Gardiner all the way to the DVP and Bayview. By 2:45 pm I was at the eastbound Gardiner lane restrictions and I thought it wasn’t that bad. The trick is to avoid rush hour.
 
innsertnamehere said:
I found this rendering of the new Garden City Skyway on IO's website - unsurprisingly it looks like it'll be a pretty standard structure:

View attachment 557225
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I'm not sure I follow the logic of twinning the bridge. QEW is quite constrained through St Catharines, Are they expecting to expropriate neighbouring proprerties to expand the ROW?
 
Admiral Beez said:
I took the Gardiner to and from Hamilton today. It wasn’t that bad. My way out at 8:30 am was Bayview to DVP south, Gardiner to Yonge, Lakeshore to Gardiner, QEW to 403. At 2pm it was 403, QEW, Gardiner all the way to the DVP and Bayview. By 2:45 pm I was at the eastbound Gardiner lane restrictions and I thought it wasn’t that bad. The trick is to avoid rush hour.
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The DVP works the same way: know when to avoid it and it's totally fine.
 
afransen said:
I'm not sure I follow the logic of twinning the bridge. QEW is quite constrained through St Catharines, Are they expecting to expropriate neighbouring proprerties to expand the ROW?
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The current structure is a tight 6 lane span with no shoulders and certainly not up to 400 series standards. If they need to do a significant rehab to it, that would cause a ton of long duration headaches both for traffic flow and construction logistics.

So to mitigate this they're going to build a new bridge, then completely close the old one for a full rehab. Once complete, each bridge will be 4 lanes with shoulders.

QEW through St Catharines is also very tight but this project gets you a extra travel lane, maybe HOV, from the skyway to the 405. This stretch is often backed up due to a long exit queue for accessing the outlet stores in Niagara, and people weaving all over the place due to the left exit to the 405- drivers deciding where they need to be on the road to travel where they want to go.
 
afransen said:
I'm not sure I follow the logic of twinning the bridge. QEW is quite constrained through St Catharines, Are they expecting to expropriate neighbouring proprerties to expand the ROW?
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The new structure is getting built to the north of the existing structure. And yes, it requires some expropriation, particularly through the industrial area on the west side of the Welland Canal.

The project is only the skyway widening though, the QEW will stay as 6 lanes through cental St Catharines to the west, at least for now.

The project is mostly being driven by rehabilitation needs of the existing structure, not the need for new capacity, but they are building the new capacity now anyway as it's needed to stage the rehabilitation of the existing structure. The finished bridges will be 4 lanes in each direction running from Glendale Avenue to the Welland Avenue / Niagara St exit on the west side of the Canal. No HOVs, at least for now.

It'll be similar to how the Burlington Skyway was pre-2007, when the QEW went from 6 lanes to 8 lanes over the bridge and back to 6 lanes on the other side again.

Personally I'm curious to see when MTO initiates a study on widening the Burlington Skyway.. it's in their long term plans, but will be a wildly expensive endeavor several times larger in scale than the Garden City Skyway twinning.
 
Does anyone else think it's time to just do away with the HOV lanes? Now that the Ontario government allows single occupant vehicles to pay to use them, they're practically impossible for the police to enforce. I often see drivers (with passengers) treat the lane as a passing/ fast lane and start tailgating the driver in front of them. Plus I see tons of vehicles with multiple occupants, and they don't seem to care to use the HOV lanes.

How have those newer HOV lanes on the 400 with the switching lanes been working out? Have they been helping with the flow of traffic in the HOVs?

Putting bus lanes on the highways would probably be more beneficial than HOV lanes. Add 407 style cameras along the bus lanes, so whenever a driver decides to use them to bypass traffic, we can snap a photo of their license plate and mail them the bill.

The 403 bus lanes that make part of the Mississauga Transitway seem useless because so many drivers treat the lanes as a shoulder when their car/ truck breaks down.
 
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Bojaxs said:
Does anyone else think it's time to just do away with the HOV lanes? Now that the Ontario government allows single occupant vehicles to pay to use them, they're practically impossible for the police to enforce. I often see drivers (with passengers) treat the lane as a passing/ fast lane and start tailgating the driver in front of them. Plus I see tons of vehicles with multiple occupants, and they don't seem to care to use the HOV lanes.

How have those newer HOV lanes on the 400 with the switching lanes been working out? Have they been helping with the flow of traffic in the HOVs?

Putting bus lanes on the highways would probably be more beneficial than HOV lanes. Add 407 style cameras along the bus lanes, so whenever a driver decides to use them to bypass traffic, we can snap a photo of their license plate and mail them the bill.

The 403 bus lanes that make part of the Mississauga Transitway seem useless because so many drivers treat the lanes as a shoulder when their car/ truck breaks down.
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I would expect this to be solved with the universal deployment of plate reading technology that seems to be in progress, given that HOT permits are issued and not instant.
 
I wonder how the traffic would look like on the Gardiner during summer weekends with the Lake Shore closures...
 
anb said:
I wonder how the traffic would look like on the Gardiner during summer weekends with the Lake Shore closures...
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Good thing they limited that to a few weekends. What if Lakeshore West GO line and Line2 are shutdown too while they do that.
 
Steve X said:
Good thing they limited that to a few weekends. What if Lakeshore West GO line and Line2 are shutdown too while they do that.
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There was a weekend where the go and TTC were both out in the west end (obviously lakeshore wasn't affected but imagine if you couldn't drive?)
 
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