Traffic moves along a section of the 401 highway in Whitby, Ont., on April 30.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Ontario Premier Doug Ford, the scent of an early election in his nostrils, has been musing lately about the struggles of people who commute by car in the Greater Toronto Area, and what his government might do to help them. He has had two big ideas in the past week alone.
One is provincial legislation to prevent the City of Toronto from installing new bike lanes if they come at the cost of lanes dedicated to cars and trucks on busy thoroughfares.
The other, announced Wednesday, is a plan to build a 50-kilometre car and transit tunnel under the 401 highway where its multiple lanes bisect the GTA. Mr. Ford said his government is launching a feasibility study into the project but in the same breath added, “We’re getting this tunnel built.”
He was also quick to say that the tunnel would be toll-free for drivers.
The tunnel announcement, so out of the blue, has caused a spike in speculation that Mr. Ford intends to call a general election well before the next scheduled date in June, 2026.
That may or may not prove to be the case, although it is undeniable that the punishing gridlock in the city and on its commuter arteries is a real issue for GTA voters right now.
But what the two announcements together definitely betray are the tired ideas that the way to reduce gridlock is to build more toll-free roads, and that bicycle lanes contribute to downtown traffic jams.
Mr. Ford argues the 401 and the 400-series highways connected to it in the GTA are expected to be at capacity within a decade, and that he is planning for the future.
Aside from the untold billions that would be spent on a 50-kilometre tunnel under the busiest highway in North America, his government is also spending billions on a new highway and a new bypass north of Toronto that will open up more land for development and, he insists, make commuting in and out of the city easier, faster and safer.
But the 401 itself is concrete evidence that adding roadway only induces demand for more of the same.
Since the 1960s, the stretch of the 401 across the top of Toronto has gone from four lanes to a minimum of 12 lanes, and as many as 18 at its widest parts. And yet it is still choked by traffic, and the arteries that feed it are overwhelmed by the demand.
And why not? For drivers, it’s free. Just like wedding guests will drink more at an open bar than at a cash bar, drivers who commute in and out of Toronto will gorge themselves on free asphalt, regardless of the lineups.
No matter how many of them you build, or how wide you build them, roads will always be a limited resource, which means the only way to manage the demand for them is through pricing: as in tolls, or in the case of Toronto proper, a congestion tax for commuters who make the choice to drive downtown.
There’s an unfairness in the fact that the other big publicly funded transportation option in Ontario, mass transit, requires a fare, while drivers get to use roads at no charge.
It’s also not fair that people living in Northern Ontario, Kingston, Ottawa or any other part of the province, have to pay to improve the commutes of people living in the GTA.
If Mr. Ford wants to reduce congestion without imposing tolls, he should spend those billions of dollars improving mass transit, so that taxpaying commuters who use the subway or local bus systems, or ride the GO Transit light rail service, enjoy some of the largesse lavished on drivers.
Expanding the reach and frequency of GO Transit and other public options would allow exurban and suburban commuters a viable alternative to the fuming experience of hours of stop-and-go traffic. It would be a less polluting option and would be less harmful to their health and stress levels. (Not to mention less harmful to the soon-to-be-paved fields and forests of southern Ontario.)
And it would reduce traffic in downtown Toronto, where the problem is not the number of bikes on the road but (repeat after us, Mr. Ford) the number of cars.
But somehow that’s never an option, just as putting tolls on roads is also politically verboten. Instead, the Ontario politician’s lone answer to Toronto gridlock is to build more grids to lock.
At this rate, the Ontario premier of the day 50 years from now, thinking of the polls, will propose... what? A 50-kilometre raised highway to match the clogged tunnel two layers of cars below it?