A stretch of the 401 highway in Whitby, Ont., on April 30.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Ontario Premier Doug Ford says his government is launching a feasibility study on building what would be the longest traffic tunnel in the world under the stretch of Highway 401 that crawls through Toronto.
Speaking to reporters with the highway roaring behind him on Wednesday, Mr. Ford said the province would look at tunnelling under the congested artery from beyond Mississauga, west of Toronto, all the way into Scarborough on the city’s east side, a distance of about 60 kilometres. But in the same breath, he also vowed to build the project – without providing a cost estimate.
On the map, Mr. Ford’s tunnel would be longer than the 51-kilometre Chunnel, which takes trains and trucks between Britain and France under the English Channel, and more than double the length of road-tunnel projects in Norway, Australia, Sweden and elsewhere around the world. Its price tag could be in the tens of billions.
The Toronto stretch of the 401, which studies say carries more than 400,000 vehicles a day, is one of the world’s busiest highways. Mr. Ford said the tunnel is needed because economic studies have shown that traffic congestion costs the province $11-billion a year and that all of the Toronto-area’s 400-series highways are expected to be at or beyond capacity within a decade. The government says its projections show travel times on the 401 doubling by 2051.
Critics immediately dismissed the tunnel as a fantasy, calling it a multibillion-dollar mess that would do little to solve the city’s traffic problems – or even worsen them. Better public transit lines, some transportation experts say, would be a better use of money and have a lasting impact on congestion.
Mr. Ford dismissed questions about costs as coming from “naysayers.” And he suggested the feasibility study would determine the tunnel’s length and cost – but not whether it would be built.
“We’ll be doing a feasibility study, so the feasibility study will come in, and we’ll be transparent. But I’ll tell you one thing, we’re getting this tunnel built,” he said.
The announcement was made with a campaign-style speech in which he targeted Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie, saying “she’s opposed to everything we’ve done.” Mr. Ford has for months refused to rule out calling an election as early as next year, a year ahead of the scheduled June, 2026, vote. Observers have suggested the government would need a large defining issue to justify an early vote.
The Premier said the tunnel would include vehicle traffic and even a public-transit corridor. But he did not say how many of the 401′s lanes – now 18 at its widest point – would be mirrored underground. He did promise that drivers in the new tunnel would not pay tolls.
Mr. Ford and his government have also refused to provide cost estimates for their proposed Highway 413, which would arc around Toronto from the west and which they made a centrepiece of their 2022 re-election campaign.
Giles Gherson, president and CEO of the Toronto Board of Trade, offered strong support for studying the 401 tunnel, saying Toronto needs big ideas to solve a congestion problem that is harming productivity and driving people and businesses away.
“We somehow have this aversion for big ideas,” he said. “We avoided them for 20 years, 30 years, and now we’re in this pickle. And now people are saying, ‘Oh, that’s a big idea, We shouldn’t do that. That’s going to cost us a lot of money.’ Okay, what’s the solution then? You aren’t going to ride a bicycle from Markham to Brampton.”
Ahmed El-Geneidy, an urban planning professor at McGill University in Montreal, said traffic studies have shown for decades that widening highways, or adding more lanes in a tunnel, only encourages more driving and reproduces the same congestion in as little as a year.
Prof. El-Geneidy said the billions to be spent tunnelling should instead go toward a dramatic scaling-up of Ontario’s commuter rail GO Train network, which would give suburban drivers an alternative.
Baher Abdulhai, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto, warned that funnelling more cars under the 401 would see more traffic exiting onto already jammed north-south routes, such as the Don Valley Parkway, further clogging other roads.
Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles called the proposal a “fantasy tunnel” and said its construction would mean years of traffic chaos. Ms. Crombie, the provincial Liberal Leader, called Mr. Ford’s proposal “a pipe dream of an idea” and said the billions would be better spent on health care and education.
Some critics compared the 401 tunnel to the “Big Dig,” a massive underground expressway project in Boston that involved about six kilometres of tunnels and went billions over budget.
Norway claims to have the longest buried road, a 24.5-kilometre tunnel that is part of a highway that links the cities of Oslo and Bergen. In the Swedish capital of Stockholm, crews are building an 18-kilometre tunnel as part of a bypass around the city the transportation authority expects to carry 140,000 vehicles a day, cost $5.5-billion and be completed by 2030.
In Australia, Sydney’s tolled WestConnex expressway system, which includes 24 kilometres of tunnels, was supposed to cost about $10-billion but ended up costing more than $20-billion when completed last year, according to a government audit.
With files from Laura Stone
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct information about the Big Dig underground expressway project in Boston, which includes about six kilometres of traffic tunnels.