Promises made by Ontario Premier Doug Ford to buy Highway 407 and remove the tolls to help ease chronic gridlock have so far come up empty,
Oshawa MPP Jennifer French, the NDP Critic for Infrastructure, Transportation & Highways, called out the government’s inaction on Highway 407 as the region faces some of the “worst traffic worldwide.”
“People deserve a government that gets them where they need to go, safely and efficiently,” said French. “While people are stuck in gridlock across the GTA, the 407 sits half-empty – and this premier isn’t doing anything about it.”
Tolls that feed back into the province are great, but the 407 is a privately owned company, and they keep all (most) of the revenue from those tolls. They are also responsible for maintaining those roads.
We got so screwed by selling the 407.
Road maintenance is always at a massive detriment for any country, and you can never recuperate those costs, especially not when you’re encouraging car use over other forms of transportation (like what Ford is doing).
This is why many of us are trying desperately to convince our government (and fellow citizens) to reduce car dependency.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Tolls are good … if that same toll money is fed back into the highway system to build better and more roads for everyone. Toll roads that just make profit for a private corporation without really benefiting the people who actually use the road is a system that doesn’t work.