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Unofficial Proposals For Toronto Highway Expansions

Also agreed. The problem isn't moving cars. The problem is moving people. Highways just don't move enough people in an urban setting to be cost-effective. If you're going to base a city on automobile use you MUST limit the density to suburban levels pretty much throughout, which means you end up with cities like Detroit, Dallas or Atlanta, which have downtown cores that are mainly parking lots and then miles and miles of suburbs. Toronto made a conscience decision back in the 1960's NOT to go down that route. We chose subways and streetcars instead. To try to reverse that decision now would be ludicrous, both financially and socially.
 
One thing I have noticed about road widenings is that, if you widen the road in one place, it will create congestion somewhere else. It's a neverending cycle of road widenings, really.
 
I totally agree with making black creek south of 401 a controlled access highway to its current termination. It would do wonders for traffic flow in that area and even on lawerence and eglington.

The next step would be to have a bigger Conversation on access to transit. It sometimes can take anywheres between 10-30 minutes depending on location from highway exit to parking spot. Sometimes the same to exit, we need to look at the access to these stations and improved that. Next would be having these Locations posted via a 'smart' parking garage. Notifying of the nearest available spot. Having all day service on some more lines would help too. Twinning Richmond hill? Line at least to Oriole station and using the compass traffic management system to notify. Of current DVP traffic.
"DVP to downtown - 40 minutes"
"Go train - 20 minutes"

This would also help educate the population of potential time savings during ruch hours.

The gatenau hydro corridor highway IMO is a great idea, that needs to be fine tuned. This highway would releive pressure on the northbound DVP considerablity. But I would just end it at the DVP with proper ramps. There would also only be ramps in one direction (no point on having someone travel south on DVP and access this highway to 401) Anyways. Bigger conversations to be had and remember any new highway is at least 10 years from initial idea to construction complete
 
I think that Black Creek should be widen, but only for a BRT that connects with the future Mt. Dennis Mobility Hub on the Eglinton Crosstown. With SEPARATE right turn lanes for the non-transit vehicles so that they don't block the buses and through traffic. Maybe even add an additional left turn lanes at Lawrence and Tretheway, with a shortened left turn signal, so that additional time would be allocated to the through traffic.
 
MisterF said:
A counter example is Los Angeles, which has the most highways of any American city but the most congestion as well. They have figured out that you can't build your way out of highway congestion and now they're buildings subways and LRT at a much faster rate than Toronto. A well developed rail system may not reduce traffic on the highways, but it does give people a much more reliable way of getting around. Cities that invest heavily into highways are generally no less congested than cities that don't. This phenomenon has been widely studied and confirmed - if you make driving easier then more people will drive. It's simple supply and demand, the same principle as lowering the price on a product to make more people buy it. The same principle applies to transit as well.
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Congestion isn't the only way to judge a transport system though. Average commute times in Los Angeles aren't that bad, really. Looking at this map of commute times by zip-code, most of LA commutes for roughly 25-35 minutes. If you consider that, what, 13 million people live in the LA urban area, that's pretty impressive really. Residents of transit dominant cities like London or Paris would be totally enviable of those kinds of commutes. In London average commutes are north of 70 minutes! LA tends to get a bad rep in the US because commute times in general in the US are some of the shortest in the world, despite Americans commuting larger distances.

Obviously there are other downsides to sprawl/autocentriccities/cardependency, so don't read this as a call to start ramming highways everywhere we can. One chief one is the environment. I'd be very curious to see how this discussion changes as cars keep getting more fuel efficient and electric cars come closer to mass affordability.
 
diminutive said:
Congestion isn't the only way to judge a transport system though. Average commute times in Los Angeles aren't that bad, really. Looking at this map of commute times by zip-code, most of LA commutes for roughly 25-35 minutes. If you consider that, what, 13 million people live in the LA urban area, that's pretty impressive really. Residents of transit dominant cities like London or Paris would be totally enviable of those kinds of commutes. In London average commutes are north of 70 minutes! LA tends to get a bad rep in the US because commute times in general in the US are some of the shortest in the world, despite Americans commuting larger distances.

Obviously there are other downsides to sprawl/autocentriccities/cardependency, so don't read this as a call to start ramming highways everywhere we can. One chief one is the environment. I'd be very curious to see how this discussion changes as cars keep getting more fuel efficient and electric cars come closer to mass affordability.
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Air and noise pollution, while an important negative side-effect of automobile use, is not the primary problem in urban areas. Space is. Cars take up too much space. LA of the 1960/70's tried to fix this problem by building so many expressways and six-lane wide boulevards that it's not really a city at all, it's a massive suburb. As the world becomes more crowded cities will either have to spread outwards or upwards. Outwards is not financially or environmentally sustainable in the long run, so the best long-term solution is to build up (e.g. increase density within existing urban areas), which requires moving a lot more people than the humble automobile can manage.
 
I don't think you can look at commute times in isolation to make direct comparisons between cities. I also think in some of these discussions people should step back and consider that congestion could be thought of as a serious problem that is good to have. A city that doesn't have a congestion problem is probably a city in danger. The fastest way to reduce congestion is de-population, economic contraction, and job loss.

Contrary to modern urban thought I don't think that building highways is necessarily a bad thing. However, most modern cities have probably already reached the point where the needs of long and short-route drivers have balanced out negating the positive benefits of adding new highway infrastructure for their existing built-up areas.

One flaw I see in contemporary public transit discussions is that they constantly suggest that transit will "reduce congestion". This is a sales gimmick. I don't see how public transit will reduce congestion in a thriving and growing urban environment. What transit does is increase the through-put of people and goods. In my opinion this should mean that first city planners should emphasize putting people on public transit and get them off roads. But the second part of the equation is that the road and highway system should bias for the movement of goods and services vehicles before the interests of individual passanger car drivers.
 
TrickyRicky said:
One flaw I see in contemporary public transit discussions is that they constantly suggest that transit will "reduce congestion". This is a sales gimmick. I don't see how public transit will reduce congestion in a thriving and growing urban environment. What transit does is increase the through-put of people and goods. In my opinion this should mean that first city planners should emphasize putting people on public transit and get them off roads.
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Taking people off roads has no effect on the amount of road traffic or congestion? You really believe this?
 
doady said:
Taking people off roads has no effect on the amount of road traffic or congestion? You really believe this?
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It's theoretically and empirically obvious... If you build a subway under a given road, and prior motorists divert to the subway, the effect is to increase the supply of road-space available, shifting the supply curve out basically. Since there is more roadspace available, the cost to use the road will decrease and more people will use it.

It's exactly the same as highway or road expansion. More supply -> lower prices -> more demand.

That doesn't mean its a bad thing though since, in both scenarios, there would be a consumer surplus as more trips are made. In an efficient transport market, transport supply would reflect the price travellers are willing to pay (which would reflect the marginal utility of given trips).

Congestion is one of the most bizarre metrics to focus on since it's more or less unrelated to capacity. Toronto could narrow all of its roads to one lane and still reduce congestion if we charged huge costs to use those roads. Or we could build huge amounts of roads and pay people to use them and have 24/7 congestion! Congestion is a pricing issue, not a supply issue.
 
LA has the most highways yes, but they actually rank near the bottom for freeway lane miles per capita. Kansas City is the worst in the States. I haven't seen a stat like that for Toronto yet so I don't know how we compare.

And the highways will never be congestion-free. People will keep on using them until they become inconvenient to use. So while building better transit will reduce congestion in the short term, you'll have people realizing it and opt to use the highway until it reaches the ripping point once again.

The goal shouldn't be to reduce congestion on highways. The goal should be to give people a car-free way to get to places. Congested highways is a good thing for PT. The goal should be to make sure that population growth leads to an increase in transit risership while keeping AADT on our highways constant.
 
The key to successful large-scale urban planning is to find the right balance between automobile/transit networks and landuse/density. You need to figure out not only where people are now, and where they are going to now; but also where they will live and work in the future, and how they will get there. Since transportation networks take a lot longer to build than most urban development the transportation network should drive the landuse/density plans. Unfortunately, since most transportation networks are publicly funded and most public agencies are adverse to spending money unless it becomes a political issue it usually happens the other way around. Development happens and the transportation network is always playing catch up. That is why there is so much congestion in the GTA. Private developers gamble on where they think the next bit of transportation funding will go and build accordingly. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. I suspect the whole push to get "expressways" built into downtown Toronto is a feeble attempt by some second-rate land developer (probably with land out near or beyond the greenbelt) to increase the value of his units by making it easier to drive to work in the core. If the GTA had had a strong and funded regional transportation plan in place thirty years ago we would be in a much better place now.
 
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